President of ExxonMobil Guyana Alistair Routledge.
GEORGETOWN, Guyana--On Monday, President of ExxonMobil Guyana Alistair Routledge said three United States (US) senators were likely misled regarding its tax filings for its Guyana operations.
Last month, three US senators had written to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, seeking answers to a series of questions related to the company’s tax filings for its Guyana operations. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Van Hollen, and Jeff Merkley sent the letter to Woods on September 23, 2025, and are seeking a response no later than October 23, 2025.
Under ExxonMobil’s 2016 contract with the Guyana government, ExxonMobil Guyana’s income taxes are paid using Guyana’s share of oil profits. The US senators are concerned that ExxonMobil may be using those government-paid taxes to claim foreign tax credits on its US tax returns.
If so, it would effectively allow ExxonMobil to reduce its US tax liability using taxes it did not actually pay, potentially resulting in an indirect subsidy from American taxpayers. As such, the US senators have asked ExxonMobil to clarify its tax filings and justify any credits claimed under these circumstances.
It was later revealed that a New York-registered non-governmental organization (NGO), Oil and Gas Governance Network (OGGN), whose members comprise primarily of Guyanese living at home and abroad, had convinced the US senators to write to ExxonMobil on the matter.
Asked to comment on these developments during a press conference at the company’s new Ogle, East Coast Demerara headquarters, Routledge said the NGO may have misled the US senators.
“It would appear that OGGN, perhaps, misled the senators somewhat. In ExxonMobil Corporation’s 2023 and 2024 tax filings, there were no Guyanese tax credits included in either of those filings, and you would recall that prior to 2023, we were not making profits here in Guyana, so there were no tax credits from that. Up until this point, there have been no Guyana tax credits used by ExxonMobil,” Routledge stated.
In fact, Routledge told reporters that ExxonMobil Guyana is still operating with a negative cash flow of around US $6 billion.
“We continue to be actually cash flow negative on an accumulative basis … we are probably still around US $6 billion in negative cash flow as we look at the cumulative expenditures and cumulative revenues that we’ve seen from the Stabroek Block,” he noted. ~ iNewsGuyana ~
