Stan­dard & Poor's Rat­ings Ser­vices said in a state­ment Wednes­day that its "A-/Sta­ble" debt rat­ing on project fi­nance en­ti­ty Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Ltd is un­changed af­ter Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai an­nounced that the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T Ltd (NGC) is con­sid­er­ing di­vest­ing 49 per cent of its sub­sidiary T&T NGL Ltd (TTNGL) via an ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing (IPO) on the T&T Stock Ex­change. TTNGL owns 39 per cent of Phoenix Park.

Con­se­quent­ly, the pub­lic would in­di­rect­ly own about 19 per cent of the project.

"We con­clude that NGC's sale of this mi­nor­i­ty share of Phoenix Park would not af­fect our rat­ing on the project's debt. A prospec­tive IPO of part of TTNGL on the T&T Stock Ex­change would not ma­te­ri­al­ly change the project's op­er­a­tions, which have con­tin­ued to be strong, and it would not cause the project's trans­ac­tion struc­ture to be a rat­ings con­straint. We be­lieve that there are suf­fi­cient an­ti-fil­ing mech­a­nisms in place to delink the project from par­ent (the gov­ern­ment) cred­it­wor­thi­ness," S&P said.

In his 2015 bud­get state­ment de­liv­ered Sep­tem­ber 8 (2014), Howai had said: "As soon as it is ap­pro­pri­ate the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed will be of­fer­ing to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty 49.0 per cent of the share­hold­ing of the Trinidad and To­ba­go NGL Lim­it­ed which com­pa­ny holds the 39.0 per cent share­hold­ing of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny in Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Lim­it­ed."

The T&T gov­ern­ment, through NGC, ac­quired 39 per cent of Phoenix Park in Au­gust 2013 from US oil com­pa­ny, Cono­coPhillips, for US$600 mil­lion. The trans­ac­tion meant that NGC moved from 51 per cent own­er­ship of Phoenix Park to 90 per cent with the re­main­ing 10 per cent be­ing owned by GE.