Renu­ka Singh

The Oil­fields Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU) to­day un­veiled its fi­nan­cial part­ner to keep the Petrotrin re­fin­ery go­ing on a long term lease-to-own arrange­ment. The union an­nounced its part­ner­ship with Suri­name-based in­vest­ment bank Sun­stone Eq­ui­ty and com­modi­ties trad­ing com­pa­ny MAK Eng­land to lease and op­er­ate the Pointe-a-Pierre fa­cil­i­ty.

OW­TU Pres­i­dent Gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get was joined by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of both com­pa­nies to­day at a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Radis­son Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain, to an­nounce the plan to lease the re­fin­ery in­stead of moth­balling it as the Gov­ern­ment in­tends. Al­though he did not give too many de­tails of the arrange­ment, Ro­get said it would a long term lease arrange­ment lead­ing to pur­chase of the re­fin­ery.

OW­TU hired Sun­stone Eq­ui­ty to as­sess the vi­a­bil­i­ty of the re­fin­ery. Its rep­re­sen­ta­tive, John van Dyke pro­nounced that the re­fin­ery was "very vi­able".

Ro­get de­scribed the bid to lease and even­tu­al­ly own the re­fin­ery as "the great­est act of pa­tri­o­tism" and promised to keep the as­set in the hands of the peo­ple of T&T. He said the union's bid will save all cur­rent jobs at the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.

"The re­fin­ery will now be able to breathe eas­i­er with this new man­age­ment di­rec­tion op­er­at­ed in a more ef­fi­cient way but con­sis­tent with the union's plan to re­struc­ture," Ro­get said.

The pro­pos­al al­so in­cludes lease and op­er­a­tion of the Au­gus­tus Long Pri­vate Hos­pi­tal which is un­der the am­bit of Petrotrin.

Ro­get, al­most tongue-in-cheek, thanked Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley for of­fer­ing the union first dibs on the re­fin­ery pur­chase. He was re­fer­ring to Row­ley's ad­dress to the na­tion in Sep­tem­ber when he gave fi­nal word on the fate of Petrotrin and of­fered the union the op­tion to take over the re­fin­ery.

Gov­ern­ment and the board at Petrotrin re­ject­ed the OW­TU's pre­vi­ous pro­pos­al but that has not stopped the union from pro­ceed­ing with the bid. This new pro­pos­al is yet to be pre­sent­ed to the board and no date for that meet­ing has been set.

This pro­pos­al comes even as the me­dia has re­port­ed that al­most 70 per cent of per­ma­nent work­ers have al­ready ac­cept­ed the com­pa­ny's sev­er­ance pack­age. Petrotrin has stuck to its pre-de­ter­mined time­line, ad­ver­tis­ing the new com­pa­nies—Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um and Paria Trad­ing Com­pa­ny—de­spite the fact that the union's in­junc­tion ap­peal is still to be heard at the Ap­peal Court.