Petrotrin chair­man Wil­fred Es­pinet says there will be no turn­ing back on the de­ci­sion to shut down the com­pa­ny and ter­mi­nate work­ers de­spite yes­ter­day’s in­junc­tion grant­ed by the In­dus­tri­al Court in favour of the Oil­fields Work­ers Trade Union. In fact, he says the com­pa­ny is pre­pared to go all the way to the Privy coun­cil if it has to.

Speak­ing to the T&T Guardian hours af­ter the court’s de­ci­sion, Es­pinet said Petrotrin’s at­tor­neys will file an ap­peal to­day, adding they hope to get a hear­ing im­me­di­ate­ly.

He said the in­junc­tion on­ly stops the com­pa­ny from is­su­ing let­ters to work­ers who are rep­re­sent­ed by the OW­TU, but turn­ing back is not an op­tion be­cause the plan to shut down op­er­a­tions “has been ef­fect­ed, it ef­fec­tive­ly means we have stopped bring­ing in ma­te­ri­als.”

“If the in­junc­tion, as I un­der­stand it, is to stop us from car­ry­ing out the ter­mi­na­tion of work­ers then I don’t know how it will work, be­cause the com­pa­ny you will ap­pre­ci­ate will not be work­ing. It will close down and you will have work­ers. I don’t know how that works,” he said.

Es­pinet ad­mit­ted the com­pa­ny has no mon­ey. Some of it, he said, was se­cured by “gov­ern­ment guar­an­tees and some was just un­se­cured to us as cred­it loans that in the present en­vi­ron­ment has dried up.”

“Petrotrin is un­able to pay its bills. We are seek­ing to get the Gov­ern­ment to give us fi­nan­cial sup­port for that amount that was giv­en to us on cred­it,” adding a Gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee will sup­port the com­pa­ny for the time be­ing un­til it con­cludes the re­struc­tur­ing process.

“If we are left as we are, we will have no mon­ey to pay work­ers and we will have dif­fi­cul­ty on get­ting any­body to help us,” he said, adding it will be near im­pos­si­ble for Petrotrin to re­fi­nance its debt.

“That is go­ing to im­pact the na­tion­al debt and it will im­pede the progress of our pro­gramme, so the coun­try as a whole will be dam­aged be­cause you will get down­grad­ed by Moody’s.”

Mean­while, Petrotrin has in­vit­ed heads of the in­dus­try to at­tend a ses­sion at the Hilton Trinidad to­day, where Es­pinet and Lisa Ali, head of the Tran­si­tion and Im­ple­men­ta­tion Of­fice, will present plans for the tran­si­tion of the com­pa­ny. The dis­cus­sion will fo­cus on new busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties as Petrotrin strives to de­vel­op an en­tire­ly new sus­tain­ably prof­itable Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion busi­ness.

Ef­forts to con­tact En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan on the court rul­ing were un­suc­cess­ful.