Bowen confident of being vindicated

by Michael Bascombe

Grenada’s Energy Minister Gregory Bowen said he is confident of being vindicated in a bribery lawsuit filed against him by a United States' oil exploration company. The complaint, filed in a New York Court last week, alleges that Bowen denied Jack Grynberg and his Colorado-based company, RSM Production Corporation, a license to explore for oil and natural gas in Grenadian territorial water because of a refusal to bribe the Grenadian Minister. In 1996, Grenada and RSM signed an exclusive Petroleum Agreement which was to have resulted in an oil and natural gas exploration development and production license being issued to RSM. But according to the lawsuit, RSM is claiming damages of US$500 million for the government’s failure to issue the company the license to begin oil and natural gas exploration. “In September 1996, in Grenada, Defendant Gregory Bowen advised Jack Grynberg that he expected significant bribe payments from RSM and Grynberg in order for them to do business in Grenada,” the lawsuit claimed. “After the refusal of RSM and Grynberg to pay bribes to Defendant Bowen, defendant Bowen obstructed, harassed and intimidated RSM and Grynberg in their efforts to explore, develop and produce Grenada’s oil and natural gas resources”.

The company’s lawyer, Daniel Abrams said that he was looking forward to the matter being decided in court.

"We stand by the complaint and we intend to prove our allegations in Court," Abrams said in an interview from his New York office.

"We expect the case to go to trial, it may take sometime but we expect it to move forward". The lawsuit is also claiming that the government rescinded the Special Envoy to Venezuela status of Grynberg which he was using to attempt to resolve maritime boundary disputes between Grenada and Venezuela. But Bowen said that the refusal to grant RSM a license was based on investigations that indicated that the company had no intentions of oil and natural gas exploration but was following a method of making agreements and selling off interests in those agreements to others. He said that there were doubts on whether RSM had the financial resources to undertake such an exploration. “I believe he was simply following his usual pattern of getting countries to sign exploration documents and then in the process finds someway of not doing anything like in Grenada’s case by calling force majeure and suspending the agreement, but at the sametime saying he has 10 thousand square kilometres of water and selling off the rights to other persons,” Bowen said. “So he is not investing but at the sametime he gets money and that is what we found about him when we looked at Africa and some former states in the then Soviet Union”. The government terminated the agreement in 2004 and announced that it was seeking legal advice on how to deal with the matter. Bowen claimed that Grynberg had approached the government indicating that he would renegotiate an agreement to make it favourable to Grenada and give a statement certifying that Bowen had never asked him for a bribe, if Grenada recalled the termination notice. But according to Bowen, when this was refused Grynberg prepared a lawsuit against him and others. Russian oil magnate Mikhail Fridman, who is believed to also have interest in oil exploration in Grenadian territorial water, is also named in the lawsuit.