The Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) has been held li­able for over US$4 mil­lion in loans it se­cured for its bid to ac­quire Petrotrin’s Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery af­ter it was closed, and the over­all com­pa­ny re­struc­tured in late 2018.

On Mon­day, High Court Judge Car­ol Gob­in up­held KCL Cap­i­tal Mar­ket Bro­kers Lim­it­ed’s case against the OW­TU and its as­so­ci­at­ed com­pa­ny Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies Lim­it­ed, which was es­tab­lished to aid in its bid for the re­fin­ery.

The loan cen­tred around two agree­ments en­tered in­to be­tween KCL Cap­i­tal and the OTWU, through its then-trustees Ozzi War­wick, Ray­mond Hug­gins, and Ernesto Ke­sar, be­tween No­vem­ber 2019 and May 2020.

Ke­sar, the union’s for­mer vice pres­i­dent, won the Point Fortin con­stituen­cy in the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed Gen­er­al Elec­tion and has been ap­point­ed Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs. War­wick is the union’s chief ed­u­ca­tion and re­search of­fi­cer.

KCL Cap­i­tal filed the law­suit af­ter the prin­ci­pal and ac­crued in­ter­est un­der both loans were not paid.

In de­fence against the law­suit, the OW­TU claimed that KCL Cap­i­tal could not seek to en­force the agree­ments as, un­der its rules, it (the OW­TU) was not per­mit­ted to use the pro­ceeds of loans to set­tle the fees of le­gal, tech­ni­cal and fi­nan­cial con­sul­tants utilised for the ac­qui­si­tion bid.

Jus­tice Gob­in re­ject­ed the po­si­tion.

“The ar­gu­ment that the rules do not al­low the trans­ac­tions re­lies on an ex­pec­ta­tion that every pos­si­ble course of ac­tion which could pro­tect and pro­mote the in­ter­est of mem­bers would be spelt out and ex­press­ly pro­vid­ed for. This to my mind bor­ders on the ab­surd,” she said.

She al­so re­ject­ed claims that the agree­ments breached Sec­tion 17 of the Trade Unions Act.

The leg­is­la­tion makes it an of­fence for union ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers to fraud­u­lent­ly utilise a trade union’s fi­nances for pur­pos­es out­side of its rules.

“In the ab­sence of fraud, mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, or mis­con­duct, the trans­ac­tions en­tered in­to by the OW­TU were not caught by sec­tion 17,” she said.

Jus­tice Gob­in al­so re­ject­ed the union’s claim that it could not be held li­able as it was not un­just­ly en­riched by the loans.

She not­ed that KCL Cap­i­tal claimed that some of the mon­ey was paid to the union and the re­main­der to ser­vice providers it iden­ti­fied, and War­wick, who was the union’s main wit­ness, did not cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­ny that the union re­ceived part of the pro­ceeds.

Stat­ing that the OW­TU and Pa­tri­ot­ic shared a close re­la­tion­ship, Jus­tice Gob­in point­ed out that it (Pa­tri­ot­ic) was in­cor­po­rat­ed by War­wick, who served as its deputy chair­man.

“Even if I were to ac­cept that the OW­TU did not re­ceive any mon­ey from KCL, the ev­i­dence es­tab­lished the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the De­fen­dants with over­lap­ping di­rec­tors and of­fi­cials and their com­mon in­ten­tion to ac­quire and op­er­ate the re­fin­ery through Pa­tri­ot­ic, which was in­cor­po­rat­ed for that pur­pose,” she said.

“It does not lie in the mouth of the union to say it did not re­ceive the funds,” she added.

Guardian Me­dia at­tempt­ed to con­tact War­wick and OW­TU Pres­i­dent Gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get for a re­sponse, but calls to their cell phones went straight to voice­mail. Ke­sar, when con­tact­ed, said “un­for­tu­nate­ly, I have not seen the judg­ment you are re­fer­ring to. How­ev­er, you can al­ways check me back lat­er for feed­back.”

The OW­TU’s bid for the re­fin­ery was re­ject­ed by the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee es­tab­lished un­der the tenure of the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) gov­ern­ment.

Late last year, for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young had claimed that Pa­tri­ot­ic did not progress to the next round of the bid­ding process due to a pur­port­ed­ly fraud­u­lent US$1.5 bil­lion wire trans­fer to its ac­counts.

In Feb­ru­ary, Young an­nounced that Niger­ian com­pa­ny Oan­do Trad­ing DM­CC had been se­lect­ed to lease the re­fin­ery.

How­ev­er, with the cur­rent Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC)-led coali­tion Gov­ern­ment led by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar tak­ing of­fice, there is doubt over the pre­vi­ous arrange­ment.

The cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion has re­peat­ed­ly stat­ed that it would work with the OW­TU to at­tempt to restart the re­fin­ery’s op­er­a­tions.

KCL Cap­i­tal was rep­re­sent­ed by Dave Williams and Sta­cy-Ann Ramkhele­wan. The OW­TU was rep­re­sent­ed by Dou­glas Mendes, SC, An­tho­ny Bul­lock, and Alatashe Gir­van.