With a his­to­ry go­ing back to 2005, the gas-to-liq­uids plant lo­cat­ed on the com­pound of the moth­balled Petrotrin re­fin­ery com­pound in Pointe-a-Pierre, has had a trou­bled and con­tro­ver­sial past.

Tues­day's email from Ni­Quan founder and CEO, Ains­ley Gill, in­form­ing the com­pa­ny's 75 work­ers that their con­tracts of em­ploy­ment were be­ing ter­mi­nat­ed, ef­fec­tive April 30, 2024, may turn out to be the be­gin­ning of the end for the project.

Giv­en the com­ment by Gill in the email that the com­pa­ny has run out of mon­ey to con­tin­ue op­er­a­tions, it is this group of em­ploy­ees who will be hard­est hit. It is quite un­like­ly they would re­ceive any mon­ey from the com­pa­ny on Tues­day, their last day. That comes on top of the fact that the salaries of these work­ers have been in­con­sis­tent­ly paid since Au­gust last year and an in­di­ca­tion from em­ploy­ees that Ni­Quan has not been re­mit­ting Na­tion­al In­sur­ance or tax pay­ments on their be­half for some time.

These 75 Ni­Quan em­ploy­ees, most of whom have de­pen­dents, face a very un­cer­tain fu­ture, as it is like­ly they would have ac­cu­mu­lat­ed debt in the pe­ri­od of in­con­sis­tent in­come.

They are not the on­ly ones to be im­pact­ed by Ni­Quan's fate.

Dozens of in­di­vid­u­als in­vest­ed mil­lions of most­ly US dol­lars in the com­pa­ny. A large num­ber of big and small fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions would have lent the com­pa­ny tens of mil­lions of US dol­lars to fund its start-up and op­er­a­tions over the last six years.

Apart from the in­vestors and lenders, Ni­Quan has many sup­pli­ers who are owed mil­lions of dol­lars for pro­vid­ing goods and ser­vices to the be­lea­guered com­pa­ny. Most vis­i­ble among Ni­Quan's sup­pli­ers is Trinidad and To­ba­go Up­stream Down­stream En­er­gy Op­er­a­tions Com­pa­ny, the spe­cial-pur­pose state en­ter­prise, which was es­tab­lished to sup­ply nat­ur­al gas to Ni­quan. That com­pa­ny has claims of over US$21 mil­lion for nat­ur­al gas it says was sup­plied to Ni­quan, but for which no pay­ment was re­ceived.

The State al­so in­vest­ed a to­tal of US$25 mil­lion in pref­er­ence shares in Ni­quan.

In­vestors, lenders and sup­pli­ers all face the pos­si­bil­i­ty of re­ceiv­ing a frac­tion of the mon­ey they are owed by Ni­Quan.

That is be­cause the an­nounce­ment of the ter­mi­na­tion of the em­ploy­ees fol­lowed a wind­ing-up pe­ti­tion filed by for­mer Ni­Quan vice pres­i­dent, David Small, who al­ready has a judg­ment against the com­pa­ny of over $20 mil­lion.

As was the case with the CL Fi­nan­cial group in 2017, wind­ing-up pe­ti­tions of­ten lead to the ap­point­ment of liq­uida­tors, whose ex­clu­sive re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is to sell the as­sets and pay cred­i­tors.

The ques­tion now is: Giv­en the years that it has tak­en to at­tempt to bring the the gas-to-liq­uids fa­cil­i­ty to com­mer­cial start up, is there any com­pa­ny that would be will­ing to take the risk of ac­quir­ing the Ni­Quan as­sets.

That risk would be am­pli­fied by the fact that an ex­ter­nal con­trac­tor was killed while work­ing on the plant in June last year. The Pointe-a-Pierre fa­cil­i­ty was al­so rocked by a huge ex­plo­sion in April 2021.

Both of these in­ci­dents may point to un­der­ly­ing tech­ni­cal is­sues with the plant.

Al­so, the first in­car­na­tion of the gas-to-liq­uids project was plagued by de­lays and cost over­runs al­most from in­cep­tion 19 years ago.

When the last em­ploy­ee leaves the plant next week, the plant's fu­ture would be in sig­nif­i­cant doubt.