The Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries now of­fi­cial­ly holds re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for three of the coun­try's key state en­er­gy com­pa­nies: Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Lim­it­ed, Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, and Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed. It fol­lows a gazette no­tice is­sued on Fri­day, May 23.

Ear­li­er this month, there was a wave of pub­lic at­ten­tion when the com­pa­nies were no­tably ab­sent from the ini­tial gazette no­tice dat­ed May 13, which out­lined min­is­te­r­i­al as­sign­ments fol­low­ing the for­ma­tion of the new UNC cab­i­net.

The omis­sion raised eye­brows in po­lit­i­cal and en­er­gy cir­cles, with for­mer En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Min­is­ter Stu­art Young pub­licly warn­ing of what he de­scribed as a “se­ri­ous over­sight.”

“If this is not im­me­di­ate­ly rec­ti­fied, it may re­sult in de­faults be­ing de­clared un­der the bond and loan agree­ments, it can al­so trig­ger law­suits based on con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions, it can al­so lead to an im­me­di­ate down­grad­ing of our sov­er­eign rat­ings. This would be dis­as­trous for Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

Young fur­ther ques­tioned how such crit­i­cal en­ti­ties, cen­tral to the coun­try’s en­er­gy in­fra­struc­ture and eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty, could be left unas­signed in an of­fi­cial doc­u­ment, warn­ing of the po­ten­tial le­gal and gov­er­nance im­pli­ca­tions.

How­ev­er, new­ly ap­point­ed Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, pushed back against the claims and dis­missed the mat­ter as “po­lit­i­cal mis­chief” and as­sured the pub­lic that the mat­ter would be clar­i­fied.

“I can as­sure him that it is safe for him to re­turn to the frol­ic on the beach, all is well. It is the ex­act sched­ule, there’s no dif­fer­ence. So the min­is­ter shout­ing now about the risk, the fi­nan­cial arrange­ments and the in­ter­na­tion­al bank­ing com­mu­ni­ty and so on, this is just mis­chief be­cause there’s no risk. There was nev­er any mis­take,” Mooni­lal said.

Fol­low­ing the cor­rec­tion, the up­dat­ed gazette was sent to Young.

"I am pleased to see that er­rors and omis­sions were ad­dressed and cor­rect­ed. Kind­ly ask Mooni­lal if I should send him my in­voice as he sug­gest­ed I look for a job. Seems like en­sur­ing he doesn’t de­stroy a del­i­cate and so­phis­ti­cat­ed en­er­gy sec­tor is a full time work," Young wrote