Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day said the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship had left the coun­try’s gas in­dus­try in dire straits, with com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing on month-to-month arrange­ments be­cause 25-year con­tracts that had ei­ther end­ed or were due to end were not ne­go­ti­at­ed.

In his con­tri­bu­tion to the de­bate on the Fi­nance Bill in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Dr Row­ley paint­ed a grim pic­ture of the in­dus­try in “a cri­sis of un­der­sup­ply” and fac­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in li­a­bil­i­ties as a re­sult.

He said when con­tract ne­go­ti­a­tions for new gas prices start­ed af­ter 2015, T&T was in the worst pos­si­ble bar­gain­ing po­si­tion with “no wrig­gle room.”

Di­rect­ing his com­ments to the Op­po­si­tion bench­es, he de­clared: “You put that coun­try in that sit­u­a­tion.”

Dr Row­ley said when he went to Hous­ton, Texas, at the head of a T&T del­e­ga­tion to meet with BP ex­ec­u­tives it was be­cause talks had bro­ken down be­tween the en­er­gy gi­ant and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) and he as Prime Min­is­ter had to in­ter­vene.

“Gas price is not ne­go­ti­at­ed like buy­ing hops in a par­lour,” he said.

He said they were able to get the two sides talk­ing and were able to ne­go­ti­ate a gas price. The al­ter­na­tive would have been shut down, he added.

Dr Row­ley asked the Op­po­si­tion to ex­plain what had hap­pened with the con­tract with OAS Con­stru­to­ra, the Brazil­ian firm that had been the main con­trac­tor for the Solomon Hochloy High­way ex­ten­sion project. He called on Tabaquite MP Dr Su­ruj Ram­bachan, who was the Works Min­is­ter at the time, to ex­plain how a clause in the OAS con­tract which pro­tect­ed tax­pay­ers was re­moved on the eve of the 2015 gen­er­al elec­tion, al­low­ing the firm to leave the coun­try with $920 mil­lion.

Re­spond­ing to crit­i­cisms of his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s han­dling of the shut­down of the Yara plant, Dr Row­ley said the 50-year-old fa­cil­i­ty was in­ef­fi­cient and its fu­ture was a mat­ter for its share­hold­ers, not the gov­ern­ment.

He al­so de­fend­ed the Drag­on Gas deal, not­ing that with on­ly 12 years of proven gas re­serves left in T&T, the in­tent was to get a sup­ply from large, proven fields “right next door” for use in the lo­cal in­dus­try.

Dr Row­ley said oth­er near­by fields are al­ready in Russ­ian and Chi­nese hands, so the gas agree­ment with Venezuela was im­por­tant.

“We have im­proved our po­si­tion,” he said.

Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, who re­spond­ed to the is­sues raised by the Prime Min­is­ter, said with the Drag­on Gas deal the Op­po­si­tion had al­ways act­ed in the in­ter­est of the coun­try. He said their role was to raise ques­tions about the deal in the in­ter­est of trans­paren­cy.

He said: “We warned the gov­ern­ment that they were get­ting in­to a sit­u­a­tion where that coun­try was po­lit­i­cal­ly volatile.”