Stu­art Young, for­mer Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, has called on the gov­ern­ment to pro­vide clar­i­ty on the re­cent­ly an­nounced six-month pro­vi­sion­al li­cence un­der the Unit­ed States Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) re­lat­ed to the Drag­on gas field.

In a state­ment on Face­book, Young not­ed his ex­pe­ri­ence se­cur­ing the 30-year li­cence for the Drag­on gas field, as well as sev­er­al OFAC li­cences, and ques­tioned the terms of the tem­po­rary arrange­ment. He specif­i­cal­ly asked whether Shell and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) would be al­lowed to make pay­ments to the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment for the gas.

Young crit­i­cised the gov­ern­ment for not in­form­ing the pub­lic, con­trast­ing their cur­rent ap­proach with that of the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion. “The PNM gov­ern­ment con­sis­tent­ly kept the pop­u­la­tion ap­prised of what was go­ing on, un­like the cur­rent gov­ern­ment whose new pos­tur­ing is both iron­ic and hyp­o­crit­i­cal, as they now claim ‘con­fi­den­tial­i­ty’ as a rea­son to not in­form the pop­u­la­tion,” he said.

He al­so ref­er­enced the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ef­forts to se­cure the Drag­on li­cence, which the UNC had pre­vi­ous­ly de­scribed as a “Se­cret Deal,” de­spite the li­cence be­ing pub­lished in the Venezue­lan Gazette.

Young urged the gov­ern­ment to be trans­par­ent about the terms of the six-month OFAC li­cence and ques­tioned what com­mit­ments the UNC made to ob­tain it.