On June 23 of this year, in an interview with Joaquín López Dóriga that is worth revisiting, Energy Secretary Rocío Nahle gave the impression of making a specific commitment to transparency about the Dos Bocas refinery. In that exchange, López Dóriga asked him if the costs of the project were still the 8,000 million dollars that had been announced. Nahle released some data and then replied with a promise: “On July 1 we are going to report to the people of Mexico, both the president and myself, how much we have spent on this investment. It is treasury money, our tax money.”
Does it still cost the same $8 billion? López Dóriga insisted. “8,915 was the cost with cogeneration. And we bring the external works. We bring the external works”, Nahle clarified. “And that’s what we’re going to talk about on July 1.”
When that first of July arrived, Nahle went off on a tangent. Of course, he spent several minutes of his speech describing the “associated works.” He mentioned a 24-inch, 65-kilometer-long gas pipeline; a 28 kilometer long aqueduct; a dispatch monobuoy; a bridge 120 meters long; a hydraulic concrete bypass 7.9 kilometers long; a water treatment plant (which was donated to the municipality). He also abounded in the administrative buildings: we know what paintings and how many replicas of Olmec heads (17) are going to be permanently exhibited; we know there is a showroom for petroleum products; we know which building has a dining room.
But he did not offer a single piece of information to understand how much they cost.
In his speech, Nahle also mentioned that the construction of Dos Bocas required 74,214 tons of rebar for the deep foundation – 10 times what the Eiffel Tower required. We know how much concrete the deep foundation required – 23 times that of the Azteca Stadium. We know that Dos Bocas requires a total of 91,459 teams. Here’s breakdown and detail, reference and even creative comparison.
But then again, that wasn’t the question. In contrast to what he suggested in his interview with López Dóriga, neither Nahle nor the president gave anything resembling a report on the use of treasury resources. In less than 30 seconds of a ceremony lasting more than an hour and a half, Nahle insisted that the total cost was $8.915 million. To this he added 1,426 million dollars of tax payments to describe the total resources transferred to the Pemex subsidiary in charge of the work. It does not seem coincidental that it is exactly the same amount that a napkin calculation of the VAT generated by 8,915 million would yield. Of the 11,000-12,000 million dollars that he already acknowledged even to the president there was no mention.
To answer López Dóriga in the same terms, Dos Bocas does not continue to cost the promised 8,000 million dollars. Not even the 8,915 that Nahle had just told him – now we learn that that calculation had just missed the equivalent of VAT. Perhaps it is not even the “11,000-12,000 million dollars that President López Obrador revealed that the Pemex council approved who knows when and under what budgetary assumptions.
But the government won’t tell us how much. Not how he calculated it. Or who has been paid. He prefers that we know how many kilos of rebar we buy for the foundation with our taxes. 10 times the Eiffel Tower!
@pzarater
Consultant
Beyond Cantarell
