Chair­man of Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd (PFTC), Nyree Al­fon­so, is on a re­cruit­ment dri­ve for six man­agers.

The state-owned en­er­gy com­pa­ny is al­so head­hunt­ing for a gen­er­al man­ag­er and a small cadre of work­ers to sta­bilise the or­gan­i­sa­tion in 2026.

When Al­fon­so was in­stalled as chair­man in Ju­ly, the com­pa­ny had an act­ing gen­er­al man­ag­er who re­placed Mush­taq Mo­hammed.

Short­ly af­ter the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress won the April 28 Gen­er­al Elec­tion, Mo­hammed re­signed from PFTC, and the com­pa­ny ap­point­ed its cor­po­rate sec­re­tary to act in the top post.

Sev­er­al oth­er em­ploy­ees were al­so ap­point­ed to act as man­agers.

Mo­hammed, who ap­peared be­fore the 2023 Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Paria div­ing tragedy, was ac­cused of do­ing noth­ing to save the lives of the four divers— Kaz­im Ali Ju­nior, Fyzal Kur­ban, Rishi Na­gas­sar, and Yusuf Hen­ry—while they were trapped in­side a sealine pipeline on Feb­ru­ary 25, 2022.

The fifth div­er, Christo­pher Boodram, who was al­so sucked in­to the pipe, man­aged to crawl to safe­ty and was res­cued.

Al­fon­so said the com­pa­ny had gaps in its staffing re­quire­ments, “which we are mov­ing apace” to ur­gent­ly ad­dress.

“There’s a lot of work in Paria to do.”

PFTC has 130 em­ploy­ees, many of whom work on an an­nu­al con­tract.

The com­pa­ny, she said, be­gan ad­ver­tis­ing for the var­i­ous po­si­tions, in­clud­ing a gen­er­al man­ag­er.

“We have six man­age­r­i­al po­si­tions we are look­ing to fill to sta­bilise the or­gan­i­sa­tion. In fact, while peo­ple are still en­joy­ing their ham and turkey, we will be out in full force, my­self and a sub­set of the board in­ter­view­ing for key po­si­tions in the com­pa­ny be­cause we want to start 2026 on a strong foot­ing.”

PFTC was es­tab­lished in 2018 through the re­struc­tur­ing of Petrotrin Lim­it­ed.

“We’ve ap­proved a re­or­gan­i­sa­tion of the struc­ture which would see less con­tract­ed work­ers at cer­tain lev­els and more per­ma­nent work­ers. There are po­si­tions that should be and will be short­ly per­ma­nent,” Al­fon­so said.

Those who act­ed as man­agers, Al­fon­so said, had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ap­ply for the posts.

Of the six man­age­r­i­al po­si­tions to be filled, PFTC has to get a ter­mi­nal and a com­mer­cial man­ag­er.

Al­fon­so said that the post of ter­mi­nal man­ag­er has been dif­fi­cult to fill.

“We tried dif­fer­ent mod­els of re­cruit­ing.”

—SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI