An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

There are mixed re­ac­tions to the state­ments made by En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art in his ar­ti­cle en­ti­tled “The truth about Petrotrin and its re­struc­tur­ing”.

Young’s ar­ti­cle was re­spond­ing to com­men­ta­tor Ralph Maraj in the Sun­day Ex­press news­pa­per of April 28, un­der the head­line “Shed Your In­tel­lec­tu­al Lazi­ness”.

Re­spond­ing to the ar­ti­cle, en­er­gy ex­pert An­tho­ny Paul told the Guardian yes­ter­day that while the min­is­ter gave some facts on the now de­funct Petrotrin, there was al­so some mis­lead­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion of facts in there.

Paul said what Young did was con­flate the loan and the op­er­a­tional loss of the com­pa­ny.

He not­ed that a large por­tion of the loan came about, as a re­sult of build­ing new plants at the re­fin­ery and that the project man­age­ment was very poor.

“There was a huge cost over­run on that plant, which had noth­ing to do with the op­er­a­tion of the fa­cil­i­ty. The min­is­ter did not go in­to the de­tails of what pushed up op­er­at­ing costs and the rea­son why we were los­ing mon­ey is that the plant was not ef­fi­cient. What that means is that the Gov­ern­ment was buy­ing crude at a high price from a long dis­tance and ship­ping it a long way, which pushed the cost up. There was crude near­by in Venezuela that the Gov­ern­ment could have got­ten, in­stead of the Rus­sians,” the en­er­gy ex­pert said.

Paul out­lined that a big part of the loan is that the Gov­ern­ment was tak­ing it to build the plant to make mon­ey, but it could not make mon­ey.

“There were some things that were true, but the min­is­ter said some things mis­rep­re­sent­ed the truth and oth­er facts were left out,” Paul added.

How­ev­er, an­oth­er en­er­gy ex­pert Gre­go­ry Mc Guire gave a dif­fer­ent spin and said the min­is­ter’s re­sponse to Ralph Maraj was high­ly pro­fes­sion­al and sup­port­ed by in­dis­putable facts.  

Mc Guire said hope­ful­ly it would have cleared up some false nar­ra­tives that con­tin­ue to gain pop­u­lar­i­ty as they are be­ing prop­a­gat­ed by peo­ple who should know bet­ter.  

These in­clude: that Petrotrin was closed down; that it was a net earn­er of for­eign ex­change, and that the re­fin­ery was prof­itable.  

He not­ed that Young has re­it­er­at­ed the truth about Petrotrin and the rel­a­tive suc­cess of Her­itage as a stand­alone pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, free of the bur­den of the loss-mak­ing re­fin­ery.

Al­so weigh­ing in on the mat­ter was Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) chair­man David Lee, who de­scribed the ar­ti­cle as “same old sto­ry with­out any ben­e­fits pre­sent­ed six years lat­er.”

Lee high­light­ed that the min­is­ter talks about the prof­itabil­i­ty of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um, but Petrotrin’s ex­plo­ration arm was al­ways prof­itable.  

“He talks about Paria’s suc­cess, but Petrotrin was a net earn­er of forex from the sale of lo­cal­ly pro­duced fu­el com­pared to Paria which must im­port fu­el. What Min­is­ter Young must tell the pop­u­la­tion is why up to this day thou­sands of Petrotrin and fence­line work­ers are still un­em­ployed as this Gov­ern­ment has nev­er re­vi­talised or as­sist­ed fence­line com­mu­ni­ties.

“Six years lat­er, cit­i­zens will not buy Min­is­ter Young’s ex­cus­es that these moves saved T&T from the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) or saved the econ­o­my be­cause if this Gov­ern­ment had this coun­try’s in­ter­est at heart, it would have kept the re­fin­ery op­er­at­ing as a go­ing con­cern,” he stressed.

And, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union Ernesto Ke­sar ques­tioned if the ad­min­is­tra­tion saw the clo­sure of the re­fin­ery as a good de­ci­sion, and why every chance the min­is­ter gets he keeps de­fend­ing the po­si­tion.  

“If you did some­thing cor­rect­ly then why are you al­ways quick to de­fend your­self? In my opin­ion, any­one who is al­ways hasty to re­spond is not sure of them­selves. The OW­TU will pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive re­sponse in the up­com­ing weeks,” Ke­sar con­clud­ed.

In the ar­ti­cle, pub­lished on Sun­day, the min­is­ter said the re­struc­tur­ing of Petrotrin and clo­sure of the re­fin­ery has been a suc­cess.  

“Not on­ly did we avoid calls on the trea­sury to make pay­ments of the long- and short-term US dol­lar debt, but we al­so man­aged to se­cure re­fi­nanc­ing of the US$850 mil­lion debt, not once but twice, at com­pet­i­tive rates of in­ter­est and with­out any gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee,” Young said.