En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal and for­mer prime min­is­ter and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young trad­ed ac­cu­sa­tions of hypocrisy yes­ter­day over the han­dling of the Drag­on Gas project and how much de­tail of the new OFAC li­cence the oth­er was will­ing to re­veal.

“It is the height of hypocrisy and shame­less­ness that Mr Young and Dr Row­ley would speak to us about terms and con­di­tions of an OFAC li­cence, when we had to go through Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion to find a copy of the one is­sued to the PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion,” he said.

He in­sist­ed that the cur­rent li­cence marks a turn­ing point for the project, which he said had been “dead on ar­rival” when the Gov­ern­ment took of­fice. “We have achieved a very sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in that it al­lows us now to cre­ate a vi­able path­way to de­vel­op­ing and pro­duc­ing the Drag­on field,” Mooni­lal said.

Mooni­lal said the new li­cence, is­sued for six months, pro­vides a le­gal frame­work for fur­ther ne­go­ti­a­tions with Venezuela and oth­er stake­hold­ers. “This is a phased process,” he said. “We will now em­bark on ne­go­ti­a­tions and seek to get an agree­ment in the best in­ter­est of all stake­hold­ers.”

Re­spond­ing to sug­ges­tions that the Gov­ern­ment had made con­ces­sions to Venezuela to se­cure the li­cence, Mooni­lal said, “The on­ly thing I think we promised Venezuela is that Mr Stu­art Young and Dr Row­ley will have no part of the en­er­gy fu­ture of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

How­ev­er, Young fired back, ac­cus­ing Mooni­lal of “com­plete ig­no­rance” on en­er­gy mat­ters. In a writ­ten state­ment, the for­mer min­is­ter said Mooni­lal’s com­ments showed that he did not un­der­stand how OFAC li­cences work.

“Min­is­ter Mooni­lal has stat­ed that doc­u­men­ta­tion re­lat­ed to the Drag­on gas project at the Min­istry of En­er­gy is in Span­ish and not Eng­lish, sug­gest­ing that an OFAC li­cence is in Span­ish,” Young said. “This con­firms to me, and the pop­u­la­tion, that Mooni­lal has not even seen the cur­rent six-month pro­vi­sion­al li­cence, as an OFAC li­cence is is­sued by the US Trea­sury De­part­ment in Eng­lish.”

He added that the doc­u­ment had been sent di­rect­ly from OFAC to NGC’s lawyers, who pro­vid­ed copies to the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny, and sug­gest­ed that Mooni­lal should “per­haps look there for a copy.”

Mooni­lal, for his part, said he found no Eng­lish ver­sions of the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment’s li­cence with­in the Min­istry of En­er­gy. “We have ab­solute­ly no doc­u­ment in Eng­lish deal­ing with the con­di­tions of the for­mer Drag­on gas li­cence,” he said. “I have asked the min­istry to pro­cure a trans­la­tion so that we can find out what were their terms and con­di­tions.”

Young re­spond­ed that while the Venezue­lan Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion li­cence was is­sued in Span­ish, both NGC and Shell had le­gal teams and trans­la­tors to pro­duce Eng­lish ver­sions. “All Mooni­lal has done is once again con­firm that the Gov­ern­ment is in­com­pe­tent and has no clue how to con­duct the task in front of it,” he said.

Mooni­lal al­so ques­tioned whether the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion had re­moved key pa­per­work from the En­er­gy Min­istry. “I no­ticed Dr Row­ley was quot­ing from some type of doc­u­ments and pa­per to­day, and I’m won­der­ing whether they took pa­pers and doc­u­ments away when they dis­grace­ful­ly demit­ted of­fice, be­cause we want those doc­u­ments back, par­tic­u­lar­ly if they’re in Eng­lish, be­cause we have to go and do that work again,” he said.

In his writ­ten re­sponse, Young dis­missed the claims as “a des­per­ate grasp at straws,” say­ing that for­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley had made his own notes for ref­er­ence and had not used any of­fi­cial min­istry doc­u­ments.

When asked about how he in­tends to man­age talks with Cara­cas amid months of height­ened rhetoric, Mooni­lal said the dis­cus­sions re­quire care­ful “en­er­gy diplo­ma­cy.”

Asked whether T&T recog­nis­es Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s pres­i­dent, he replied, “Those is­sues do not arise at this point. We are con­cerned with the three to four tril­lion cu­bic feet of gas in the Drag­on field and the terms and con­di­tions of the li­cence from Venezuela.”

Young, how­ev­er, main­tained that Mooni­lal’s com­ments and the Gov­ern­ment’s over­all han­dling of the project showed why he was be­ing “left out of com­plex en­er­gy ne­go­ti­a­tions.”

He al­so crit­i­cised Mooni­lal for re­mov­ing the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary from the En­er­gy Min­istry, say­ing that the de­ci­sion erased valu­able in­sti­tu­tion­al knowl­edge.