Cur­tis Williams

Lead Ed­i­tor Busi­ness

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

The Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed has qui­et­ly con­firmed that there has been a shake-up of its board of di­rec­tors fol­low­ing the Cab­i­net de­ci­sion not to re­new the con­tracts of Sean Balkissoon, one of on­ly two di­rec­tors who vot­ed against the ill-fat­ed NGC at­tempt to save At­lantic LNG Train 1, and Ken­neth Al­lum who raised is­sue with it but even­tu­al­ly vot­ed for the deal.

The shake-up was first re­port­ed by the Busi­ness Guardian of Feb­ru­ary 10th.

The NGC up­dat­ed its web­site with its list of Di­rec­tors and Alum and Balkissoon names were re­moved and re­placed by Dr Joseph Is­mael Khan and Dr Don­nie Bood­lal.

The Busi­ness Guardian had re­port­ed that Al­lum of­ten chal­lenged NGC pres­i­dent Mark Lo­quan at board meet­ings and it ap­pears this did not go down well with the gov­ern­ment.

Con­rad Enill, who has been em­broiled in con­tro­ver­sy in the midst of a law­suit from busi­ness­woman Jen­ny Shar­ma, has re­tained his po­si­tion as chair­man of the board of di­rec­tors.

Balkissoon was orig­i­nal­ly ap­point­ed di­rec­tor on the NGC Board on Jan­u­ary 28, 2019.

Both Balkissoon and Al­lum are high­ly qual­i­fied with ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in the en­er­gy sec­tor.

The re­moval of both men comes less than six months af­ter the Busi­ness Guardian (BG) broke the sto­ry that the NGC had thrown away a quar­ter bil­lion dol­lars be­hind the failed Train 1 deal and was re­ly­ing on gas con­tract­ed to the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor in its ef­fort to restart the plant.

It is now con­firmed that the mon­ey is lost as the gov­ern­ment se­cret­ly signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Agree­ment with bpTT, Shell and the NGC that puts an end to Train 1.

The Busi­ness Guardian had al­so re­vealed that in mak­ing the in­vest­ment the di­rec­tors tried to pro­tect them­selves from fu­ture lit­i­ga­tion by ask­ing for an in­dem­ni­ty for their ac­tions.

The NGC and Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion tried to keep At­lantic LNG Train 1 op­er­at­ing in the face of BPTT and Roy­al Dutch Shell, both the largest share­hold­ers of At­lantic Train 1 and the largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­ers, say­ing they did not have nat­ur­al gas to op­er­ate Train 1 and it should be shut down.

It was a risky strat­e­gy led by Lo­quan and the pro­ject­ed loss to the com­pa­ny could have been as high as US $64.7 mil­lion or $440 mil­lion had NGC not walked away in Au­gust last year.

In a ra­dio in­ter­view Enill said, “If you look at what the con­di­tions were at that point in time, the NGC found it­self in a sit­u­a­tion where most of these down­stream com­pa­nies were not tak­ing the gas al­lo­cat­ed to them. So we had a sit­u­a­tion where we had gas, we had to pay for gas and the down­stream­ers were ba­si­cal­ly say­ing lis­ten, on the ba­sis of the cost that is avail­able to us, we pre­fer to shut our plants down, at least for some time. And in those cir­cum­stances, we had a sit­u­a­tion where the NGC faced a sig­nif­i­cant amount of loss­es.”

Enill went on fur­ther to ex­plain what the sit­u­a­tion was like in De­cem­ber 2020, “We looked at the sit­u­a­tion where we had gas, do­mes­tic gas, and yes Cur­tis is cor­rect, BP wrote us and said to us, lis­ten we have some short­ages, we think it is go­ing to be about a month or so, we un­der­stood that was nor­mal and we could deal with that. So we were work­ing on the ba­sis that we had gas, and we had no tak­ers. We had planned a Train 1 main­te­nance of which the NGC would pay some por­tion be­cause we are part own­ers in Train 1.”

He added, “At­lantic came to us and said, we need you to make a de­ci­sion be­cause by Jan­u­ary 12, 2021 if you do not com­mit to the main­te­nance on this plant, the next op­por­tu­ni­ty that you have is in No­vem­ber of 2021, be­cause im­me­di­ate­ly, as soon as your plant is main­tained, we have to do shut­downs on two and then three in the nor­mal course of things.

“We found our­selves in a sit­u­a­tion, there­fore, where, NGC took the de­ci­sion that we are go­ing to sup­port and main­te­nance of the plant al­though the oth­ers (BPTT, Shell, the Chi­nese in­vestors) de­cid­ed that they were not go­ing to so do, be­cause we un­der­stood that we had gas that was avail­able for do­mes­tic which we were ne­go­ti­at­ing, which if it had been con­vert­ed to LNG to at least give us some rev­enue. That was in De­cem­ber.”

The NGC’s web­site sim­ply says that the two new di­rec­tors were ap­point­ed in Feb­ru­ary.