Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

For­mer Petrotrin ex­ec­u­tives ac­cused of pay­ing them­selves hefty pen­sions, per­for­mance bonus­es and salaries to the tune of mil­lions of dol­lars, must be in­ves­ti­gat­ed and charged if found guilty.

So said pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union An­cel Ro­get as he called for a foren­sic au­dit in­to Petrotrin, fol­low­ing a me­dia ex­pose that Petrotrin was seek­ing to re­cov­er mil­lions of dol­lars in unau­tho­rised salary in­creas­es award­ed retroac­tive­ly to se­nior of­fi­cials.

Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at OW­TU's Para­mount Head­quar­ters yes­ter­day, Ro­get warned that the OW­TU would rise up and take ac­tion if wrong­do­ers were not in­ves­ti­gat­ed and pun­ished.

"We are not con­vinced that the board and min­is­ter are pe­rus­ing ag­gres­sive­ly those who are ac­cused of wrong-do­ing. We had been rais­ing those is­sues be­tween 2010 and 2015 even as they con­tin­ued to re­or­gan­ise the com­pa­ny's op­er­a­tions with no dis­cus­sions from the union," Ro­get said.

Say­ing the ex­pos� was not sur­pris­ing, Ro­get said the OW­TU was hit with lit­i­ga­tion for speak­ing out. Call­ing for a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to cor­rup­tion al­le­ga­tions, Ro­get added: "We be­lieve these claims should be ful­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ed."

He al­so said a "full fi­nan­cial foren­sic au­dit in­to the fi­nan­cial op­er­a­tions of Petrotrin be­tween 2010 to 2015," must be done, adding: "De­fin­i­tive steps must be tak­en to re­cov­er all the mon­ey that was paid out."

Ro­get al­so con­demned the of­fi­cials for dip­ping in­to Petrotrin's pen­sion fund which was owned by the work­ers. He al­so called for a freeze on any ex­tra pen­sion al­lot­ment giv­en to the ac­cused of­fi­cials un­til their names were cleared. Ro­get fur­ther said that some of the of­fi­cials were still ben­e­fit­ting from free hous­ing, elec­tric­i­ty, wa­ter, ca­ble and se­cu­ri­ty even though they were no longer part of the com­pa­ny.

Of­fi­cials re­spond

Mean­while, a for­mer of­fi­cial who re­quest­ed anonymi­ty sought to jus­ti­fy the hefty salary in­creas­es say­ing by 2012 the man­age­ment (non-unionised staff) had not re­ceived ad­just­ments for five years and high­er scales unionised em­ploy­ees were be­ing paid more than low­er lev­el man­age­ment em­ploy­ees. He said in March 2012, the board ap­proved a salary and grade sched­ule for some 200 mem­bers of man­age­ment. The of­fi­cial said a salary in­crease was grant­ed to for­mer vice-pres­i­dent Ken­neth Al­lum and for­mer pres­i­dent Khalid Has­sanali in their fi­nal months of ser­vice.

"This is not an un­com­mon prac­tice at Petrotrin. It is gen­er­al­ly de­signed to fa­cil­i­tate the en­hance­ment of an em­ploy­ee's pen­sion ben­e­fits by grant­i­ng an in­crease in the last month or year of em­ploy­ment de­pend­ing on the em­ploy­ee's pen­sion­able ser­vice and per­for­mance and the length of time since the em­ploy­ee's last salary in­crease," the source said.

He not­ed that a bonus to the pres­i­dent of up to six months base salary was an es­tab­lished Petrotrin pol­i­cy and Has­sanali's salary was not fi­nalised un­til May 2015 and ap­plied retroac­tive­ly to date of ap­point­ment as pres­i­dent in May 2012. The of­fi­cial al­so said none of the in­di­vid­u­als gave them­selves salary in­creas­es.

"The in­creas­es for Al­lum and Has­sanali were grant­ed by the chair­man, act­ing on au­thor­i­ty giv­en to him by the board. The vice-pres­i­dent of hu­man re­sources and cor­po­rate ser­vices was re­quired to sign off on these in­creas­es as an ad­min­is­tra­tive re­quire­ment and to in­struct pay­roll staff to im­ple­ment the salary in­creas­es," the source added.