Nadaleen Singh

In­ac­cu­rate. That's how John T Canal, pres­i­dent and Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of Bunkers In­ter­na­tion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (BIC) de­scribes the per­cep­tion that the com­pa­ny will by­pass the work­ers at state-owned Petrotrin when its bunker­ing op­er­a­tions pick up steam in T&T. He was dis­pelling con­cerns last week by Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) leader, An­cel Ro­get, that BIC would con­tract out jobs which Petrotrin's Ma­rine Di­vi­sion and fill­ing bond nor­mal­ly un­der­took,

Al­fred Canal, chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer, con­firmed that a li­cence was award­ed for BIC to pro­vide bunker­ing ser­vices but a few mi­nor de­tails were to be worked out and that would not take much longer. "Li­cences were grant­ed by the En­er­gy Min­istry. We just have to fin­ish up the pa­per­work with the dif­fer­ent de­part­ments, (such as) cus­toms and mar­itime agen­cies, it is just a for­mal­i­ty," he said.

Three weeks ago, at a post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine had an­nounced Cab­i­net agreed on the is­sue of a mar­ket­ing li­cence for BIC. Al­fred said BIC's ex­is­tence in T&T would mean the com­pa­ny would be adding to the in­dus­try since there would be more work for Petrotrin. He added: "We have thou­sands and thou­sands of ship­ping com­pa­nies that buy from us and we want to help de­vel­op Petrotrin and Trinidad to a much larg­er bunker­ing port.

"If we do that there will be more Petrotrin work­ers to de­liv­er more fu­el to more barges and more ships and there would be more work for Petrotrin, not less." With op­er­a­tions in Colom­bia and sev­er­al oth­er coun­tries, as well as at its head of­fice in Lake Mary, Flori­da, Canal said in­cor­po­rat­ing lo­cal con­tent in its op­er­a­tions had been a "crit­i­cal" as­pect of its busi­ness and the same ap­plies to its T&T op­er­a­tions.

"We cer­tain­ly know to op­er­ate here. We will have to have lo­cal tal­ent, lo­cal ex­per­tise. We cer­tain­ly know we will need lo­cal peo­ple," he added. Re­spond­ing to the com­ment that BIC would make bil­lions in prof­its, Al­fred said that was not true be­cause the busi­ness of bunker­ing was a low-mar­gin busi­ness. He said: "Bunker­ing is not re­al­ly a high-mar­gin busi­ness, I am not sure where that came from.

"There is a lot of risk. You have to bring in equip­ment, peo­ple. You have to pay a lot of port ex­pens­es, you have to get lo­cal peo­ple here to sup­port that busi­ness, the busi­ness car­ries a lot of in­sur­ance, car­ries in­ven­to­ry that may de­pre­ci­ate. "You lose on every deal once the mar­ket drops. You have to stay com­pet­i­tive even though you are los­ing on every deal. Right now shipown­ers are suf­fer­ing ter­ri­bly."

Asked to out­line the na­ture of the con­tract, he said he could not dis­close what was be­ing ne­go­ti­at­ed, say­ing it is based on ne­go­ti­a­tions and some­times on what the mar­ket has to of­fer. "We don't have that part com­plet­ed yet. In part I think when the an­nounce­ment came that we had been grant­ed the li­cence, we were aware of it at the same time. We know once it came we would have to put every­thing in­to play," he added.