Barrow seeks quick House approval of the taxes

Barrow is hoping to institute the windfall tax as soon as possible to meet his budget projections, and plans to present legislation to the House soon enough. This morning the P.M. estimated how much G.O.B. hopes to gain when it comes on stream.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“We expect to collect, by way of the split of the windfall profits, between sixteen and eighteen million dollars starting from September and running through March, which will be the end of the financial year. We are hoping to have the legislation pass by the national assembly by the end of August so that these arrangements can come into force by the first of September. This would mean then that for the full fiscal year we are looking at thirty-six million, perhaps a little more. We have done our calculations on a base price of a hundred and thirty dollars per barrel. It’s higher than that now and I actually expect that it will average out to about a hundred and forty dollars per barrel.”

In other petroleum news, this morning Barrow noted that the Venezuelan Government has reformatted the Petrocaribe fuel import credit formula. When G.O.B. initially purchased fuel from Venezuela, it only paid sixty percent of the cost up front, while forty percent was put into a loan fund and paid back over a twenty year period. That changed to a fifty/fifty deal earlier this year and after a Petrocaribe Summit over the weekend, the formula was changed once again. The new system is: when the cost of fuel goes above eighty dollars per barrel the credit bracket is fifty/fifty; above one hundred dollars a barrel, it is forty up front, sixty in the fund; and over a hundred and fifty dollars the credit goes up to seventy percent.