Richard Lord

Pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) An­cel Ro­get wants to know why Petrotrin chair­man Lind­say Gillette and oth­er di­rec­tors are still on the job af­ter cost­ly oil spills at La Brea and else­where last month.Ro­get raised the is­sue with re­porters mo­ments af­ter pre­sent­ing a let­ter ad­dressed to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, seek­ing an ur­gent meet­ing to dis­cuss the re­cent spills and mis­man­age­ment by the Petrotrin board.

It was re­ceived by press sec­re­tary Fran­cis Joseph at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter short­ly af­ter 10 am yes­ter­day. Joseph promised to de­liv­er it to the PM.The OW­TU leader and more than 30 oth­er mem­bers went to de­liv­er the let­ter but Per­sad-Bisses­sar was at an of­fi­cial en­gage­ment at an­oth­er venue.Ro­get said they were re­quest­ing the meet­ing in the in­ter­est of all stake­hold­ers and he was con­fi­dent Per­sad-Bisses­sar would re­spond ap­pro­pri­ate­ly be­cause of its na­tion­al im­por­tance.

The OW­TU want­ed to meet with Per­sad-Bisses­sar, he said, be­cause "the on­ly per­son we could turn to in this mo­ment of cri­sis for our na­tion­al oil com­pa­ny is the Prime Min­is­ter her­self."He claimed that pri­vati­sa­tion of the com­pa­ny would be the next move by the Petrotrin man­age­ment.

Ro­get said the union want­ed to present the facts of the oil spills to the Prime Min­is­ter as the com­pa­ny was en­gaged in a cov­er-up ex­er­cise. In re­sponse to ques­tions, Ro­get de­nied OW­TU mem­bers had is­sued threats to any­one, as claimed by the com­pa­ny. He said the al­le­ga­tion was friv­o­lous and in­tend­ed to di­vert at­ten­tion from the facts of the re­cent spills."We are not about threats, the on­ly threat we would make is that we will stand in de­fence of the na­tion­al in­ter­est and the peo­ple of T&," he said.

Ro­get not­ed that threat had been is­sued since 1937 when the labour move­ment was es­tab­lished and OW­TU was not both­ered or de­terred by the al­le­ga­tion.There have been more that 11 oil spills at oil in­stal­la­tions in De­cem­ber last year. Petrotrin con­tract­ed the Flori­da-based firm Oil Spills Re­sponse Ltd to clean up beach­es in the La Brea area at a cost of more than $8 mil­lion. Fish­er­folk and res­i­dents of the com­mu­ni­ties have been ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed by the spills.

The En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) last week fined Petrotrin $20 mil­lion for en­vi­ron­men­tal breach­es as a re­sult of the oil spills, which have been dev­as­tat­ing flo­ra and fau­na in the south­west­ern part of the coun­try.