Brooklyn, New York
February 2, 2026
There is a temptation, when a scandal of this magnitude erupts on the other side of the Atlantic, to treat it as someone else’s problem. Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier. His network was rooted in American institutions. The failures of accountability that sustained him for decades belonged, one might argue, to American courts, American regulators, American media. That temptation should be resisted.
Guyana is not America. But Guyana is something arguably more vulnerable: a nation in the act of becoming wealthy, at precisely the moment when the institutions that are supposed to govern that wealth are still being built. The Epstein affair did not create a new problem. It revealed the anatomy of an old one — and that anatomy maps, with uncomfortable precision, onto the structural challenges we face right now.
Strip away the sensationalism, the celebrity names, and the partisan theater, and what remains is a case study in how wealth insulates itself from consequence. Epstein maintained access to the most powerful circles in the world not because he was the smartest man in any room, but because he made himself structurally useful to those with the power to look away. Banks processed his transfers. Lawyers shielded his finances. Prosecutors offered him sweetheart deals. Institutions that should have sounded alarms instead looked the other way. The system did not fail Epstein’s victims because of a single bad actor. It failed them because it was never designed, at a structural level, to constrain someone like him. This is the lesson that matters for us. Not the identity of the individuals caught in his web, but the architecture — or rather, the absence of architecture — that made the web possible.
Epstein’s financial empire was built, in significant part, on the exploitation of offshore jurisdictions. He relocated his financial operations to the US Virgin Islands, where he could reduce his federal tax burden by 90% while remaining within the American banking system. His wealth was deliberately obscured across shell companies, offshore accounts, and opaque financial vehicles. Years later, prosecutors could not even determine his net worth. Guyana is not an offshore tax haven. But Guyana is a nation whose single most consequential financial instrument — the Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil and its partners — has been criticized for its lack of transparency. The terms under which this nation’s oil wealth is being divided between the sovereign and the international operator are not fully visible to the public. The questions have gone largely unanswered.
If the Epstein affair teaches us anything about financial opacity, it is this: the moment you allow the architecture of money to become invisible to the public, you have created the preconditions for capture. That is not a prediction. It is a pattern.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Epstein revelations is not that powerful people participated in his crimes. It is that institutions which were duty-bound to stop him chose, in effect, not to look. Universities accepted his philanthropy. Financial regulators did not ask hard questions. Media organizations declined to pursue stories that were, in many cases, already on record. These were not acts of conspiracy. They were acts of institutional inertia — the quiet, bureaucratic choice to let someone else’s problem remain someone else’s problem. Every ministry, every regulatory body, every oversight committee in Guyana that processes oil wealth faces the same quiet choice. The question is not whether any individual official intends to enable corruption. The question is whether the system is designed so that looking away is the path of least resistance.
The 2021 amendments to the Natural Resource Fund Act, which eliminated the Macroeconomic Committee and transferred oversight responsibilities to the NRF’s Board of Directors, were defended by the government as necessary for fiscal efficiency. Critics argued they weakened independent oversight at precisely the moment when the fund was accumulating billions of dollars. That debate is not over. And given what the Epstein files have taught us about how institutions lose their capacity to check power, it deserves to be revisited with far greater urgency than it has received.
The Epstein story was already known in many cases. Reporters had filed stories. Allegations had been made public. And yet the story did not achieve critical mass for years — because the media ecosystem in which it existed was not designed to challenge the interests of the people it implicated. Guyana’s media landscape is small. Press ownership is concentrated. The space available for investigative journalism — the kind of journalism that asks uncomfortable questions about where the money goes and who benefits — is narrow. This is not an accusation. It is a structural observation. A democracy that depends on oil wealth for its fiscal foundation cannot afford a media sector that is too close to the interests it is supposed to scrutinize.
Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida resulted in a plea deal that legal scholars have since described as a sweetheart arrangement — one that would have been inconceivable for an ordinary defendant. It reflected a system in which wealth and political connections could effectively purchase a different quality of justice. Guyana’s judiciary is, by constitutional design, independent. But independence on paper and independence in practice are two different things. In a nation where the executive controls the fiscal pipeline — where contracts, procurement, and investment decisions flow from a single center of power — the question of whether the courts, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Attorney General can function as genuine counterweights is not theoretical. It is the most consequential governance question this country faces in the next decade.
Perhaps the most important insight from the Epstein affair is one that is rarely articulated clearly: the window for building accountability structures is narrow, and it closes faster than most people expect. Epstein’s network did not become entrenched overnight. It was built incrementally, transaction by transaction, relationship by relationship, over years in which each individual step seemed small and manageable. By the time the full scope of what had been constructed became visible, dismantling it was extraordinarily difficult.
Guyana is producing approximately 900,000 barrels of oil per day. Annual oil revenue is projected to exceed three billion dollars in 2026. Production could reach 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030. The wealth is arriving faster than the institutions designed to govern it are being built. That gap — between the speed of the money and the speed of the oversight — is precisely where the Epstein lesson lives.
The Epstein affair is not, ultimately, a story about one man’s depravity. It is a story about what happens when a society decides — consciously or by default — that certain people are too important, too useful, or too wealthy to be held to the same standards as everyone else. Guyana has not made that decision. But decisions of this kind are rarely made all at once. They are made incrementally: in the decision to weaken an oversight committee; in the reluctance to fund investigative journalism; in the quiet acceptance that certain questions will not be asked and certain answers will not be given.
The corrective is not a moral exhortation. It is structural. It requires full public access to Natural Resource Fund accounts and withdrawal schedules. It requires procurement processes that are transparent, competitive, and auditable. It requires an independent judiciary that is structurally insulated from political pressure. It requires a media sector with the space and resources to do its work. It requires that unanswered questions be answered — publicly, completely, and promptly. None of this is radical. All of it is available. The question is whether there is political will to build it before the money makes the choice for us.
Terrence Richard Blackman is the Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
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