Richard Lord

Pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) An­cel Ro­get is ad­vis­ing mo­torists to fill up their tanks as a re­li­able sup­ply of gas can­not be guar­an­teed over the com­ing days. He gave the warn­ing in an in­ter­view with re­porters af­ter a three-hour meet­ing with En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine at his Wa­ter­front Com­plex of­fice, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.

"In the mean­time fill up your tanks be­cause we are not sure that we can guar­an­tee a re­li­able sup­ply of gaso­line to the mo­tor­ing pub­lic," Ro­get added. He said work­ers have im­por­tant roles to play in en­sur­ing there was gaso­line at the pumps. "Those per­sons in­volved in the pro­vi­sion of that gaso­line, they must be high­ly re­spect­ed, prop­er­ly paid and com­pen­sat­ed and more than that, they must be safe while they do that type of pro­duc­tion," Ro­get said.

Asked if Petrotrin work­ers would walk off the job again, Ro­get said that de­ci­sion would be tak­en if a meet­ing sched­uled with the board to­day was un­suc­cess­ful. He in­sist­ed Petrotrin must be al­lowed to max­imise re­sources of the state, via the pro­posed bunker­ing fa­cil­i­ty. Ro­get said the OW­TU would not al­low the bunker­ing is­sue to die. He said the op­er­a­tion of a bunker­ing fa­cil­i­ty was a lu­cra­tive busi­ness and Petrotrin should be al­lowed to op­er­ate that fa­cil­i­ty in the in­ter­est of the peo­ple of T&T and not any pri­vate com­pa­ny.

He said he want­ed to know what link Bunkers Oil T&T Lim­it­ed com­pa­ny had with the Gov­ern­ment and al­leged there was more cor­rup­tion in T&T?since the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship?was elect­ed to Gov­ern­ment in 2010. Ro­get said yes­ter­day's meet­ing with the En­er­gy Min­is­ter in­clud­ed is­sues in­clud­ing vari­able pay­ment for Petrotrin work­ers and the fil­ing of out­stand­ing va­can­cies at the state-owned com­pa­ny.

He said while the mat­ter of the fill­ing of va­can­cies was for the board, he claimed it was be­ing done in a man­ner to al­low those close to the Gov­ern­ment to se­cure those po­si­tions. Labour Min­is­ter Er­rol McLeod walked past Ro­get at the end of the in­ter­view, with­out greet­ing him. McLeod is a for­mer pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the union. Mean­while, Ram­nar­ine spoke with re­porters at a sep­a­rate news con­fer­ence in his of­fice min­utes lat­er.

He said the is­sues of the fill­ing of va­can­cies and the vari­able pay­ment to work­ers were to be ad­dressed by the Petrotrin board. Ram­nar­ine said the meet­ing went well. "We are bet­ter in­formed on the con­cerns of the OW­TU," he added. The min­is­ter said de­spite claims by Ro­get, no li­cence had been grant­ed to Bunkers Oil Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed to op­er­ate the fa­cil­i­ty. He said a con­di­tion­al ap­proval was giv­en be­cause of the ex­pen­di­ture in­volved in es­tab­lish­ing the com­pa­ny.

Ram­nar­ine said noth­ing could be done by the com­pa­ny un­til a li­cence was grant­ed. He said it would on­ly be grant­ed af­ter a due dili­gence study was done by his min­istry. He said based on Ro­get's con­cerns about the need for Petrotrin to be en­gaged in the project, the com­pa­ny would do a com­mer­cial eval­u­a­tion of the busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties that pre­sent­ed it­self in the process of bunker­ing.

Ques­tioned about the in­dus­tri­al ac­tion at the com­pa­ny, Ram­nar­ine said he pre­ferred to wait and see if the work­ers would walk off again mere days af­ter they re­turned to their jobs. He said if fur­ther in­dus­tri­al un­rest took place the min­istry had con­tin­gency plans in the in­ter­est of the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty.