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Monday, June 30, 2025

Imbert: Transfer pricing to be examined

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20161027

Gov­ern­ment is about to en­gage in­ter­na­tion­al con­sul­tants to ex­am­ine trans­fer pric­ing–a means to se­cure top en­er­gy rev­enues–and to look es­pe­cial­ly at At­lantic LNG, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said on Mon­day night as he wound up de­bate on the 2017 Bud­get in the Sen­ate.

"I want to an­nounce we're very close to en­gag­ing in­ter­na­tion­al con­sul­tants to look at trans­fer pric­ing and to look es­pe­cial­ly at At­lantic LNG. We're en­gag­ing ex­perts in gas pric­ing and in­ter­na­tion­al le­gal ex­perts to look at the con­tracts for Trains I, II, III, and IV for the LNG plant and see ex­act­ly how our LNG is sold," he said.

Im­bert said it was nec­es­sary since there were al­le­ga­tions that the price that was re­port­ed to T&T from which the rev­enue flows, was not the cor­rect price.

"We there­fore need ex­perts to see whether it is true or not," he said.

Im­bert said an LNG car­go might leave Point Fortin head­ing to the Unit­ed States where the bench­mark price might be $2.80 and "half-way along the trip some­one might pur­chase that car­go and the ship would just turn around and head for Japan or Eu­rope where the price in the past was dif­fer­ent, $3 or $10.

"So the car­goes are di­vert­ed be­fore they reach their fi­nal des­ti­na­tion. The per­son who gets the fi­nal sale of the car­go gets the ben­e­fit of the $10 price...there's an ar­gu­ment that T&T's rev­enue was be­ing cal­cu­lat­ed on the low­er price."

The min­is­ter added: "What the multi­na­tion­als do is they sell the prod­uct to af­fil­i­at­ed com­pa­nies. Es­sen­tial­ly they are sell­ing it to them­selves and then that en­ti­ty un­sells it to some­body else, so they re­al­ly get far more rev­enue than they are re­port­ing to us.

"But if you talk to the com­pa­nies they say all of that is not true, all of that is mis­chief, lies and, there­fore, the on­ly way to deal with that now is to be sci­en­tif­ic and pro­fes­sion­al about it."

Im­bert said he had no doubt T&T could get more as a coun­try from oil and gas com­pa­nies based in the coun­try.

"I can tell you this Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, is go­ing to look at that," he

On an­oth­er is­sue, Im­bert said or­gan­i­sa­tions like Ser­vol "would cer­tain­ly re­ceive favourable re­view from his Min­istry but it can­not be like that for every­thing, it can­not be."

He ex­plained: "Some or­gan­i­sa­tions will just have to try and do more with less–that's why we have to run a deficit be­cause if we didn't, we might have to cut Petrotrin by a bil­lion and that might cause re­trench­ment which might cause an un­favourable re­ac­tion."


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