Washington Post: Rex Tillerson got burned in Venezuela. Then he got revenge.
Rex Tillerson hadn't been CEO of ExxonMobil very long when the late president Hugo Chavez made foreign oil companies in Venezuela an offer they couldn't refuse. Give the government a bigger cut, or else.
Most of the companies took the deal. Tillerson refused.
Chavez responded by nationalizing ExxonMobil's considerable assets in the country, which the company valued at $10 billion. The losses were a big blow to Tillerson, who reportedly took the seizure as a personal affront.
Only Tillerson didn't get mad, at least in public. He got even.
Flash forward to May 2015. Just five days after former military general David Granger was elected president of the South American nation of Guyana, unseating the country’s long-ruling leftist party, ExxonMobil made a big announcement.
In the deep blue waters 120 miles off Guyana’s coast, the company scored a major oil discovery: as much as 1.4 billion barrels of high-quality crude. Tillerson told company shareholders the well, Liza-1, was the largest oil find anywhere in the world that year.
For tiny Guyana (population 800,000), the continent's only English-speaking country and one of its poorest, it was a fortune-changing event, certain to mark a "before and after" in a country long isolated by language and geography.
There was just one problem with this undersea bonanza. Venezuela claimed the waters — and the hydrocarbons beneath them — as its own.
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WNU Editor: I have friends in Guyana .... they told me last year that this oil find was huge, and it was going to change their lives. I hope so .... but when one looks at what is happening in Venezuela today .... and their claims to two-thirds of Guayana .... who knows what the Maduro government may do next. They (Venezuela) had no problems in the past of nationalising the oil industry, and now with the prospect of Guyana becoming a successful oil producer and exporter may just be too much for the Venezuelan leadership to stomach.
1 comment:
The leadership in Venezuela doesn't need anymore problems than what they have, but desperate people do not have clear judgement.
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