State-owned oil com­pa­ny Petrotrin said yes­ter­day that it is in the mid­dle of a planned shut­down to car­ry out main­te­nance on cer­tain plants.In re­sponse to the lead sto­ry in the Sun­day Guardian, the com­pa­ny re­it­er­at­ed in a state­ment that the shut­down was "in ac­cor­dance with our strate­gic project plans and process­es.""Part of the over­all strat­e­gy en­com­passed both labour re­la­tions and prod­uct in­ven­to­ry man­age­ment.

"In re­spect of labour, the OW­TU rep­re­sents the work­ers en­gaged in this shut­down and it is for this rea­son, the OW­TU's sup­port was ob­tained and a Mem­o­ran­dum of Agree­ment was ex­e­cut­ed on Jan­u­ary 8, 2014, be­tween Petrotrin and the OW­TU for the uti­liza­tion of com­pa­ny labour. "Apart from labour re­la­tions, Petrotrin's man­age­ment has been ac­tive­ly en­gaged in man­ag­ing the prod­uct in­ven­to­ry.

"Petrotrin is util­is­ing small­er dis­til­la­tion units for pro­cess­ing eq­ui­ty crude to sup­ply prod­uct to crit­i­cal mar­kets."The com­pa­ny said a US$150 mil­lion bond had been re­deemed or paid off since Jan­u­ary 17, 2012.