Pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) An­cel Ro­get is main­tain­ing his op­po­si­tion to any move to have pri­vate com­pa­nies op­er­ate on oil and gas fields con­trolled by state-owned Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny of T&T. Mem­bers of the OW­TU demon­strat­ed out­side the Par­lia­ment build­ing at Tow­er D, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.

Ro­get, in an in­ter­view dur­ing the protest ac­tion said: "The at­tempt be­fore was to chop it up to blocks and give them out to pri­vate en­ter­prise and that we are against." Ro­get said the Gov­ern­ment was tak­ing ac­tion with­out con­sult­ing the union. He said the union had been ask­ing ques­tions about that and oth­er mat­ters with­out suc­cess.

"We con­tin­ue to have dif­fi­cul­ty with the way in which all of those as­sets are be­ing man­aged...That's our con­cern," he said. Ro­get said the OW­TU was "step­ping up our cam­paign against the min­is­ter's (of En­er­gy) lack of stew­ard­ship and re­spon­si­ble ap­proach."

He said: "As far as the OW­TU is con­cerned, the stew­ard­ship of this Gov­ern­ment leaves a lot to be de­sired." Asked to com­ment on the fu­ture of the OW­TU as a mem­ber of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ), Ro­get said the union will "il­lus­trate to all on May 24, what we have been say­ing for quite a while."