Thirteen companies have submitted Expressions of Interest (EOI) and five have been shortlisted with evaluations set to commence soon, for the award of a contract for the execution of ExxonMobil Guyana’s cost-recovery audit.
Director of the Department of Energy in Guyana, Dr. Mark Bynoe, made the disclosure at a press conference held on Monday in Georgetown.
He said a joint institutional evaluation was carried out with the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Audit Office of Guyana (AOG), in keeping with the World Bank and National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s tendering processes.
“For this review, thirteen firms submitted Expressions of Interest, five firms have been shortlisted. We’re currently awaiting the submission of their technical and financial proposals for evaluation with a possible award of contract by the end of March 2019,” he stated.
OilNOW reported in December that PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services Limited was one of the companies that submitted an EOI to the Government of Guyana for the cost recovery audit consultancy.
ExxonMobil Guyana’s estimated recoverable contract costs for its offshore operations has been an issue of heated discussion among various stakeholders in the country, some of whom have expressed concern that the local agencies do not yet have the capacity to perform such audits. The Ministry of Natural Resources had put out an advertisement inviting expressions of interest from consultancy firms to conduct the audit and provide on-the-job training to staff of GRA and AOG on cost recovery auditing.
The upfront costs to be audited for the company amount to some US$460 million. ExxonMobil has said that this sum was spent on a range of activities and interventions which led to the world-class Liza discovery.
