Point a Pierre MP David Lee says the Gov­ern­ment’s abil­i­ty to of­fer a month­ly salary of $180,000 per month plus oth­er ben­e­fits to the new­ly hired for­eign CEO of state oil com­pa­ny Her­itage Ltd while re­main­ing un­moved and silent as 137 tax­pay­ing na­tion­als were fur­loughed by the state-owned Caribbean Dock­yard and En­gi­neer­ing Ser­vices Ltd (Cari­doc), "demon­strates the con­tin­ued dis­dain this Gov­ern­ment has for its own cit­i­zens."

In a me­dia re­lease, MP Lee said, "it is even more atro­cious and de­grad­ing to­wards our own cit­i­zens that for­mer Petrotrin work­ers, those who built the oil in­dus­try, have been forced to protest against this gov­ern­ment’s fail­ure to ad­dress key is­sues on their pen­sion and med­ical plan as re­cent as this week while this gov­ern­ment en­sures the new Her­itage CEO is giv­en such a hefty pack­age."

He said this Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to al­lo­cate mon­ey for all oth­er as­pects ex­cept its main pri­or­i­ty, the de­vel­op­ment, en­rich­ment, and pros­per­i­ty of its own cit­i­zens.

"Af­ter all of the boasts up­on tak­ing of­fice that this gov­ern­ment would en­sure the pro­tec­tion of lo­cal con­tent in our en­er­gy sec­tor, why didn't the Gov­ern­ment uti­lize the di­verse, dy­nam­ic, and sig­nif­i­cant lo­cal tal­ent which we have de­vel­oped over decades in the en­er­gy sec­tor for this po­si­tion?" Lee asked.

MP Lee said Her­itage’s oil pro­duc­tion fell by over 1 mil­lion bar­rels of oil from 2021 to 2022 while the com­pa­ny still con­tin­ues to un­der­per­form Petrotrin and the Gov­ern­ment must en­sure Erik Kesku­la de­liv­ers on “val­ue for mon­ey” by im­me­di­ate­ly turn­ing around Her­itage.