A for­mer bpTT em­ploy­ee has be­come the first per­son to be hired in the new Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion Com­pa­ny that is to emerge from State-owned Petrotrin.

Nigel Camp­bell has been hired as the com­pa­ny’s new Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer and the an­nounce­ment was made last Fri­day by Raynold Ajod­has­ingh, a mem­ber of Petrotrin’s board of di­rec­tors.

In an in­ter­nal memo dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 14, 2018, Ajod­has­ingh said, “Please be ad­vised that Mr Nigel Camp­bell has been ap­point­ed Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer with ef­fect from 2018 Sep­tem­ber 1. Your sup­port and co-op­er­a­tion with Mr Camp­bell would be ap­pre­ci­at­ed.”

Cam­bell’s ap­point­ment is in keep­ing with a state­ment made by Petrotrin chair­man Wil­fred Es­pinet that all Petrotrin em­ploy­ees will be sent home and the 800 jobs in the new Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny will be open to any­one and not just for­mer em­ploy­ees.

Camp­bell’s LinkedIn pro­file shows that he worked at bpTT as its Fi­nan­cial Comp­trol­ler from 1997 to 2002, be­fore mov­ing on to work for three years as a fi­nan­cial ad­vis­er to the Bermu­da gov­ern­ment. In 2006, Camp­bell worked as a fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sor with BHP and from 2008 to 2013 was the fi­nance man­ag­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go. Camp­bell has since worked as the fi­nan­cial comp­trol­ler for the Trinidad op­er­a­tions of Stork Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices In­ter­na­tion­al. He holds a BSC in In­dus­tri­al Man­age­ment, is al­so a cer­ti­fied pub­lic ac­coun­tant and has an MBA in Lead­er­ship, In­no­va­tion and Man­age­ment.

Con­tact­ed on the is­sue yes­ter­day, in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian, Es­pinet said Camp­bell had been con­tract­ed to fa­cil­i­tate the tran­si­tion.

In an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian, Es­pinet had said the de­ci­sion was tak­en to “wipe the slate clean” and en­sure that the new E&P Com­pa­ny was not “sad­dled with the bag­gage of the old Petrotrin.”

“We want a new com­pa­ny that will have no bag­gage and will be in a po­si­tion to gen­er­ate cash flows to pay its debt and make a re­turn to the share­hold­er. In send­ing home all the em­ploy­ees from E&P, so we avoid con­tention on why one per­son was al­lowed to stay on and an­oth­er let go. Plus we will need peo­ple with cer­tain types of knowl­edge and skill sets that may not now ex­ist in the or­gan­i­sa­tion, so we felt we should ter­mi­nate every­one,” Es­pinet ex­plained.

Asked if this meant that the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union would no longer be the recog­nised trade union in this new com­pa­ny, Es­pinet said, “You will have to ask them that your­self.”

Last month, the de­ci­sion to shut down the re­fin­ery was an­nounced and at that time it was re­vealed that the 1,700 work­ers in the re­fin­ery would be re­trenched.

Es­pinet said find­ing a pri­vate part­ner for the new E&P was al­so a dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty.

“You know this busi­ness much bet­ter than me and peo­ple tell us that we could sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease crude pro­duc­tion, and that is great, but to do that, I know it will cost a lot of mon­ey which we do not have. So I am think­ing we can have a part­ner in the com­pa­ny, we may have a part­ner to do spe­cif­ic things in spe­cif­ic ar­eas. What I am say­ing is that there are many pos­si­bil­i­ties.”

The OW­TU has ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of shut­ting down Petrotrin in an ef­fort to sell it to the pri­vate sec­tor.