PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Leader of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice David Ab­du­lah has said the Board of Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny can not be giv­en a ‘bligh’ for the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars like­ly lost due to an ill-fat­ed at­tempt to restart op­er­a­tions at LNG Train One.

Ab­du­lah dis­cussed the mat­ter dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Sun­day and not­ed that mil­lions of dol­lars had been lost through mis­man­age­ment and mis­use of mon­ey at the state-owned com­pa­ny by both this ad­min­is­tra­tion and the pre­vi­ous UNC gov­ern­ment which could have been pre­vent­ed. But he said this did not ab­solve the cur­rent Board from the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.

“We al­so are very un­hap­py and we firm­ly dis­agree with the Board of NGC be­ing giv­en a bligh by say­ing that they can­not be held li­able for any er­rors they may have made with re­spect the de­ci­sions tak­en with train 1. That is wrong. If you are put in a po­si­tion on the Board, you have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and you have to be ac­count­able. You can­not have pow­er with­out ac­count­abil­i­ty,” said Ab­du­lah dur­ing the con­fer­ence which was host­ed on Zoom.

“And there­fore, if you have been giv­en a bligh, giv­en this sit­u­a­tion, of not go­ing to be held li­able for any de­ci­sions that they have made and pro­tect­ing them against any le­gal ac­tions in­dem­ni­fy­ing them against any le­gal ac­tions that may be against NGC that is wrong be­cause peo­ple val­ue your own pub­lic of­fice or your pri­vate of­fice. You have to be held to ac­count and the minute we stop hold­ing peo­ple to ac­count. We are in trou­ble,” said Ab­du­lah.

Train 1’s op­er­a­tions had been in ques­tion from as far back as 2019, but there had been nu­mer­ous at­tempts since then in at­tempt to fore­stall its fi­nal shut­down, with the NGC’s in­vest­ment in 2020 one such en­deav­our.

“All we know is what as we re­port­ed in the me­dia, which is, that NGC might put them­selves in a po­si­tion to have lost about 400 mil­lion TT dol­lars be­cause they put mon­ey in­to train one to re­fur­bish the plant. And so on, even though it was shut down. In prepa­ra­tion for it to get restart­ed, there’s no gas to restart it. So that it seems to be mon­ey that is dead mon­ey, but it’s not small mon­ey,” said Ab­du­lah, who al­so gave some his­to­ry con­cern­ing the train, not­ing it was not the first time Trinidad and To­ba­go may have lost out on mil­lions on Train 1.

He ex­plained that in an at­tempt to en­cour­age in­vest­ment in the bur­geon­ing LNG sec­tor, a 15 year tax break was grant­ed to Train 1’s start up in­vestors.

“So Trinidad, and To­ba­go as a coun­try got lit­tle or noth­ing out of train 1. Yes. We got mon­ey from in­creased nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion off­shore. So we got mon­ey from rev­enues from Gas pro­duc­tion, but we did not get much mon­ey from the train one, be­cause there was a 15 years tax hol­i­day,” said Ab­du­lah.