An­tho­ny Wil­son

The Min­istry of Works and Trans­port has been slow to con­clude ne­go­ti­a­tions with Swiss off­shore drilling con­trac­tor, Transocean, that will lead to the pay­ment to the Gov­ern­ment of at least US$35 mil­lion ($231 mil­lion) for the moor­ing of nine drill­ships off the coast of Ch­aguara­mas for close to years, T&T Guardian in­quiries have re­vealed.

News that the Gov­ern­ment is owed mil­lions of US dol­lars comes as thou­sands of bank cus­tomers through­out the coun­try com­plain about be­ing un­able to get the for­eign ex­change that they re­quest­ed.

The drill­ships have been cold stacked (moored) off Trinidad's north-west penin­su­la since the be­gin­ning of 2015, as the sharp de­cline in the price of oil from the end of No­vem­ber 2014 led to a slow­down in off­shore drilling ac­tiv­i­ty in the West­ern Hemi­sphere by en­er­gy com­pa­nies. Those com­pa­nies de­pend on drill­ships for ex­plorato­ry off­shore drilling of new oil and gas wells or for sci­en­tif­ic drilling pur­pos­es.

Transocean chose to moor the rigs off Trinidad's coast be­cause of the coun­try's cen­tral lo­ca­tion in the hemi­sphere and al­so be­cause the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fered the com­pa­ny a com­pet­i­tive price be­tween the be­gin­ning of Jan­u­ary 2015 and the gen­er­al elec­tions in Sep­tem­ber that year when the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship was vot­ed out of of­fice.

Short­ly af­ter the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment as­sumed of­fice, the moor­ing fee was in­creased to US$8,000 per day per ship, which means that if the new rate was made ef­fec­tive Sep­tem­ber 2015 that Transocean would owe the Gov­ern­ment close to US$35 mil­lion.

Ques­tioned on the is­sue on De­cem­ber 3, Transocean spokesper­son in Hous­ton, Pam Eas­t­on said: "We have been work­ing with the Gov­ern­ment to fi­nalise the agree­ment, which in­cludes com­pen­sa­tion for the area al­lo­cat­ed to the rigs off the coast of Ch­aguara­mas for as long as the rigs re­main moored. We have found those with whom we have been work­ing to be very sup­port­ive, and look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing our work in Trinidad."

Asked why it was tak­ing so long for an agree­ment to be com­plet­ed with Transocean, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said the ma­rine di­vi­sion of his min­istry was work­ing to firm up the arrange­ments with the Swiss mul­ti-na­tion­al com­pa­ny.

"There is no dis­pute over the amount of mon­ey owed per ves­sel per day by Transocean," said Sinanan.

Transocean is one of the largest off­shore drilling con­trac­tors in the world and has of­fices in 20 coun­tries in­clud­ing Cana­da, the US, Nor­way, Brazil and T&T.