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Friday, July 11, 2025

Warner hears of racket at Lake Asphalt

by

20111031

Mil­lions of gal­lons of as­phalt and bi­tu­men from Trinidad Lake As­phalt, La Brea, can­not be ac­count­ed for, Works Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er heard when he vis­it­ed the fa­cil­i­ty yes­ter­day.The min­is­ter, who or­gan­ised a meet­ing with of­fi­cials of the com­pa­ny to ad­dress com­plaints by con­trac­tors about dif­fi­cul­ty in ob­tain­ing bi­tu­men to com­plete projects, was in­stead stunned by rev­e­la­tions from chair­man Kuar­lal Ram­per­sad about an as­phalt rack­et in­volv­ing con­trac­tors and Petrotrin of­fi­cials. Ram­per­sad al­so re­vealed that con­trac­tors owe Lake As­phalt more than $24 mil­lion which it was cur­rent­ly try­ing to re­cov­er.

De­scrib­ing the rev­e­la­tions as star­tling and mind-bog­gling, Warn­er said: "Am I to as­sume that this is like the diesel rack­et? I want to know where the bi­tu­men is go­ing and who are the cul­prits be­hind it." The pitch rack­et was re­vealed dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion by chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, De­onar­ine Sarab­jit, af­ter Warn­er asked how Lake As­phalt's sup­ply could be greater than their de­mand."Where it (bi­tu­men) go­ing?" the min­is­ter ques­tioned.At that point Ram­per­sad in­ter­ject­ed, say­ing their in­ves­ti­ga­tions re­vealed con­trac­tors were re­quest­ing more as­phalt than re­quired for projects.

He said Lake As­phalt could not ac­count for what the con­trac­tors were do­ing with the ex­cess.Ram­per­sad said the board had im­ple­ment­ed mea­sures to ar­rest the sit­u­a­tion. Ef­fec­tive Jan­u­ary 1, next year, all con­trac­tors must be reg­is­tered busi­ness part­ners with Lake As­phalt and all move­ments of the com­pa­ny's bi­tu­men and TLA would be mon­i­tored. Ram­per­sad said there was one in­stance where a con­trac­tor asked for 3.2 mil­lion bar­rels of bi­tu­men to do a project, but on­ly "one point, some­thing" was used.An­oth­er con­trac­tor, he said, bought three mil­lion gal­lons to fix a road, but when they checked with the Min­istry of Works he had not been hired to do any jobs in T&T.

"When we did our in­ves­ti­ga­tions we re­alised that cer­tain con­trac­tors have this al­liance, this re­la­tion­ship with Petrotrin peo­ple, so they will call and they will move in with the trucks and then they will make their de­mands, fill up bi­tu­men," he said.Ac­cord­ing to Ram­per­sad, Lake As­phalt al­so was look­ing at qual­i­ty con­trol be­cause there were re­ports that con­trac­tors were mix­ing the prod­uct with some­thing else.PURE's project man­ag­er, Hay­den Phillip, re­vealed that a few years ago they sent re­fin­ery bi­tu­men sam­ples for test­ing at Lake As­phalt and re­ceived what ap­peared to be car­bon copies re­sults, stat­ing that it was Trinidad Lake As­phalt.

Ex­press­ing con­cern about the qual­i­ty of roads, Warn­er said: "I want to know whether I have any­thing to fear about the Point Fortin high­way."Per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of En­er­gy, Ju­liana John Boodram, as­sured that Gov­ern­ment was putting mea­sures in place to re­cov­er rev­enue."At the min­istry we have recog­nised, not on­ly in Lake As­phalt, not on­ly with diesel, but in oth­er ar­eas Gov­ern­ment is los­ing rev­enue. "For in­stance, in the min­is­te­r­i­al di­vi­sion in ag­gre­gates we are los­ing a lot of rev­enue but we putting sys­tems in place si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly.Af­ter the meet­ing, Warn­er said he did not want to pre­judge the is­sue.

He said: "If what has been re­vealed to­day is cor­rect and I have no rea­son to doubt that it is not cor­rect, then we have to do cer­tain checks and bal­ances."The nice thing for me is we al­ready have the diesel mat­ter to go by and there­fore we don't have to re-in­vent the wheel and we shall use that as a ba­sis. I don't want to pre­judge the is­sue."Asked why Warn­er was not in­formed about the sit­u­a­tion be­fore, Ram­per­sad said the ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties were un­earthed three months ago fol­low­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the Min­istry of En­er­gy.He said Warn­er was not in­formed be­cause he was not the line min­is­ter.

How­ev­er, the pre­vi­ous line min­is­ter, Car­olyn Seep­er­sad Bachan, and the cur­rent min­is­ter were made aware of the sit­u­a­tion.Warn­er not­ed that Lake As­phalt had the best as­phalt in the world but T&T had the worst roads and he promised that mea­sures would be put in place to en­sure val­ue for mon­ey.


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