Prof. Hinson is unfamiliar with petroleum accounting fundamentals – Bright Simons reacts

• Bright Simons has responded to Professor Ebo Hinson's assertions over the GNPC saga

• He is of the view that Prof. Hinson lacks a better understanding of petroleum accounting fundamentals

• Simons said Hinson ruins what he says is a good debate regarding the GNPC's quest to increase its oil blocks

Vice President of IMANI

Read full articleAfrica, Bright Simmons has responded to assertions made by Prof. Hinson who is a lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School.

Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson had earlier suggested that Bright Simmons was smearing the GNPC with false misrepresentation after the latter questioned the GNPC’s resolve to acquire two stakes in Ghana’s offshore fields.

In a response to media reports, Bright Simmons in write-up sighted by GhanaWeb sought to indicate that Professor Hinson was rather “unfamiliar with petroleum accounting fundamentals” hence he “ruins a good debate with a weak framing of the situation.”

“Professor Hinson seems so unfamiliar with petroleum accounting fundamentals that he ruins a good debate with such weak framing,” Bright Simons wrote.

“Hinson’s strange response to our argument that Hess, Aker and TRG discloses their costs through filings in more stringent jurisdictions and as such we are better served in using those filings as our best source of truth is to airily wave his hands away,” his statement read in part.

It continued, “He insists that those filings do not include a bunch of costs the international oil companies (IOC) incur in Ghana, and which they choose to disclose only to their friends in the GNPC. GNPC has in fact recently talked about a “data room” set up specifically for them to “audit” those costs.”

“In case Professor Hinson doesn’t know, GNPC is not a regulator in the petroleum industry. It is not the Ghana Revenue Authority. And it is neither an auditing entity nor an audit standards regulator of any kind. Whatever sweetheart arrangement it has with Aker and Inge Rokke for the latter to selectively disclose data about costs to it but not to their own regulators in their home countries has no real import in this analysis. We prefer to use data disclosed in stringently regulated jurisdictions where such sweetheart arrangements are not trumpeted as evidence of rigour,” it added.

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