For­mer ex­ec­u­tive chair­man of state-owned Petrotrin Mal­comb Jones said he feels dis­heart­ened and dis­ap­point­ed that af­ter 45 years of ser­vice to the en­er­gy sec­tor, he is fac­ing le­gal ac­tion from the Gov­ern­ment.Jones said his at­tor­neys have re­spond­ed to the pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter that was served on him and oth­er mem­bers of the for­mer Petrotrin board."Our lawyers have re­spond­ed to the pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter and we are wait­ing on the Gov­ern­ment's re­sponse. "

Lawyers act­ing on be­half of the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al wrote the for­mer Petrotrin chair­man and the com­pa­ny's for­mer di­rec­tors, call­ing on them to pay dam­ages to­talling $1.2 bil­lion (US$190 mil­lion) in re­la­tion to over­runs on Petrotrin's gas-to-liq­uids (GTL) project.

In a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter, at­tor­ney Ger­ald Ramdeen called for set­tle­ment of the is­sue with­in 28 days, fail­ing which, the State is to file an ac­tion al­leg­ing breach of du­ty of care in re­la­tion to the GTL project, which had a project cost of US$136 mil­lion (TT$857 mil­lion) in Sep­tem­ber 2006, but lat­er re­port­ed­ly saw costs es­ca­late to US$240 mil­lion (TT$1.5 bil­lion).

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's team has ar­gued that the mem­bers of the for­mer board, from 2006-2009, made de­ci­sions to go ahead with the project and au­tho­rised a to­tal of 33 pay­ments in re­la­tion to a guar­an­tee tak­en out for it. They ar­gue that no due dili­gence was done to as­cer­tain whether the com­pa­ny could have sup­port­ed the pay­ments and whether the con­trac­tor could have fin­ished on time, in a sit­u­a­tion where time was of the essence.

Jones did not want to get in­to the specifics of the di­rec­tors' re­sponse, ex­cept to say that all times they act­ed in the best in­ter­est of Petrotrin. He de­scribed work­ing at the com­pa­ny as the most dif­fi­cult as­sign­ment he ever had and the out­come has now made him ques­tion why he left his po­si­tion in the pri­vate sec­tor to serve the state-owned oil com­pa­ny.

He said: "I was pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of what is now Methanex, and I was asked to serve at Petrotrin. I could have re­mained in the pri­vate sec­tor, but I de­cid­ed to serve my coun­try. Don't get me wrong, I don't re­gret serv­ing my coun­try, but I do have sec­ond thoughts about how it has end­ed."

Jones said Petrotrin is a com­pa­ny with struc­tur­al prob­lems, in­clud­ing weak lead­er­ship and sys­tems which are sys­temic and which he tried to change."When you have a com­pa­ny in which the man­age­ment, su­per­vi­sors and work­ers all be­long to the same union, it is al­most im­pos­si­ble to man­age. This is part of the chal­lenge that I faced and I did my best to change it. You have to be in Petrotrin to tru­ly un­der­stand what I am talk­ing about."

He said what Petrotrin need­ed was a strong team of man­age­ment whose mem­bers were pre­pared to take the hard de­ci­sions nec­es­sary to move the com­pa­ny for­ward.Jones said this was not the case when he was the ex­ec­u­tive chair­man. He said part of the chal­lenge Petrotrin faced was that its best and bright­est man­agers had tak­en vol­un­tary sep­a­ra­tion when it was of­fered to the com­pa­ny and what was left were many in­ex­pe­ri­enced and, in some cas­es, less tal­ent­ed staff reach­ing top po­si­tions.

Petrotrin has an­nounced that its unau­dit­ed prof­its for 2011 is $2 bil­lion.