Guyana's political stalemate is dragging on amid slow progress in a closely watched recount of votes from a disputed 2 March parliamentary election.
The electoral outcome is critical to the country's future oil policy, six months after ExxonMobil started deep-water production on the Stabroek block.
Only around a quarter of votes have been recounted so far, with a 25-day estimate for the full process.
A result will be known "by the middle to late June, if all goes well with the recount," an official of the country's elections commission announced.
The controversy deepened last week when the government attacked the head of the Organisation of American States election observer mission, former Jamaican prime minister Bruce Golding, as being "partisan with unquestionable links" to the main opposition PPP party.
Golding told a meeting of the OAS permanent council on 13 May he had "never seen a more transparent effort to alter the results of an election."
Golding "appears to have now become an unabashed co-conspirator of the PPP seeking to defy the will of the Guyanese people," government spokesman Joseph Harmon claimed.
ExxonMobil was producing 77,500 barrels per day of crude oil in early May, 37.6 percent higher than the January output, according to the country's energy department that forecasts 120,000 barrels per day by early June.
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