The Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) says it con­demns the ac­tion of any Petrotrin em­ploy­ee who may have will­ing­ly sub­mit­ted false aca­d­e­m­ic or tech­ni­cal cre­den­tials.The union said it pub­licly pledged its sup­port for any "foren­sic" in­ves­ti­ga­tion aimed at weed­ing out "any act of cor­rup­tion" with­in the state-owned oil com­pa­ny.An­cel Ro­get, pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the OW­TU, made the de­c­la­ra­tion yes­ter­day as he re­spond­ed to claims of a probe to in­ves­ti­gate some 22 em­ploy­ees of Petrotrin who might have fal­si­fied their qual­i­fi­ca­tions to the de­part­ment of hu­man re­source and cor­po­rate ser­vices (HRCS).In a tele­phone in­ter­view, Ro­get re­spond­ed to al­leged re­ports that the com­pa­ny's "foren­sic au­dit" en­tailed a full scale re­port of both the pri­vate and cor­po­rate cor­re­spon­dence (tele­phone and e-mail) of top lev­el of­fi­cials.

"We are pre­pared to give ev­i­dence be­fore any com­mis­sion or en­quiry in­so­far as the probes in­to the foren­sic au­dit are con­cerned and will sup­port the out­come of any probe which un­earths any act of cor­rup­tion," he said."As for the em­ploy­ees, we are not aware of any probe in­to al­le­ga­tions of em­ploy­ees fal­si­fy­ing their qual­i­fi­ca­tions, but I can say this, the union will not sup­port any fal­si­fi­ca­tion of doc­u­ments or pa­pers in or­der to se­cure em­ploy­ment in Petrotrin."Fraud Squad de­tec­tives con­firmed on Thurs­day that the mat­ter in­volv­ing the "fal­si­fy­ing of cre­den­tials" be­long­ing to some Petrotrin em­ploy­ees, was a "fresh" in­ves­ti­ga­tion and had al­ready been the source of in­quiries.

In adding that it "must not be any witch-hunt" up­on the in­no­cent, Ro­get said: "If the probe has to go legal­ly in­to ar­eas to un­cov­er in­for­ma­tion rel­a­tive to bring­ing wrong­do­ers to jus­tice, then so be it but at the same time we say it must be done with­in the con­fines of the law."No low­er-lev­el em­ploy­ee must be made scape­goat for what ob­vi­ous­ly is the in­volve­ment of top man­age­ment and de­ci­sion-mak­ers in the com­pa­ny whom we know have been con­sis­tent­ly vi­o­lat­ing the laws with im­puni­ty over the years," he said."I do not know if it may be right for those per­sons at the top to be im­pli­cat­ing in­no­cent work­ers at the low­er lev­els who were, per­haps, fol­low­ing in­struc­tions."

Ro­get said Petrotrin was bad­ly man­aged and rid­dled with cor­rup­tion and the union had since called for the re­moval of the com­pa­ny's top man­age­ment, whom it felt must be com­pelled to do the right thing.Ro­get con­tend­ed that what­ev­er di­rec­tion these probes took, union mem­bers were not de­tract­ed, since it was they who "called for all of these things (in­ves­ti­ga­tions) to hap­pen."He said he had placed be­fore the Min­istry of En­er­gy and the Petrotrin board of di­rec­tors, a new gov­er­nance struc­ture which sought to re­move "those po­lit­i­cal­ly ap­point­ed po­si­tions" to cater for "the de­vel­op­ment and progress" of the state en­ter­prise.

Asked how he felt about the "de­par­ture" of Petrotrin's vice-pres­i­dent, hu­man re­sources and cor­po­rate ser­vices, Pre­ston George, from the com­pa­ny two weeks ago, Ro­get said the work­ers were hap­py he left."I can tell you, work­ers were hap­py and were singing joy­ous songs in cho­rus when they heard that Pre­ston George de­part­ed the com­pa­ny."We, at the lev­el of the union, had ma­jor dif­fi­cul­ty with the en­tire HRCS de­part­ment be­cause there was a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of vi­o­la­tions of the col­lec­tive agree­ment which took us to the courts and for which mat­ters Petrotrin lost."