Nadaleen Singh

Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Lim­it­ed (NEL) has al­ready eval­u­at­ed own­er­ship struc­ture op­tions for TSTT, so when the ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al by Ca­ble and Wire­less (CWC) is fi­nalised a struc­ture can be put in place.

In the state­ment at­tached to NEL's con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments for the nine months end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2014, chair­man Ken­ny Lue Chee Lip said: "We have eval­u­at­ed the var­i­ous op­tions for the own­er­ship struc­ture of TSTT, if the merg­er were to pro­ceed and in due course will work with the oth­er share­hold­er on the way for­ward to pre­serve our in­vest­ment in TSTT. We will keep share­hold­ers in­formed of this de­ci­sion."

In the mean­time, he as­sured that TSTT's prof­itabil­i­ty as at De­cem­ber 31, 2014 was bet­ter than for the pre­vi­ous fi­nan­cial year.Ac­cord­ing to Lue Chee Lip, the prof­itabil­i­ty of Trin­gen, an­oth­er com­pa­ny in NEL in­vest­ment port­fo­lio, was "mar­gin­al­ly bet­ter" than for the pre­vi­ous nine-month pe­ri­od in 2013."In the last cal­en­dar quar­ter of 2014, Trin­gen un­der­took an en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy im­prove­ment project and turn­around on its Trin­gen I plant," he said.

"The com­pa­ny's op­er­a­tions con­tin­ue to be af­fect­ed by nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment. Fur­ther in the last few months, com­mod­i­ty prices in the en­er­gy sec­tor have been falling and as a re­sult the pro­ject­ed earn­ings will be low­er for our in­vestee com­pa­nies in the gas and petro­chem­i­cals sec­tors. We ex­pect to see a mod­er­ate last quar­ter.

He added: "NBC, LNG and Na­tion­al Flour Mills record­ed bet­ter earn­ings. Over­all, NEL re­port­ed $401 mil­lion in prof­it af­ter tax for the nine months end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2014. This rep­re­sents an in­crease of 16.3 per cent com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year. NEL's lat­est in­vest­ment in Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Ltd helped NEL to pro­duce at­trac­tive div­i­dends for share­hold­ers.

"NEL al­so record­ed its first div­i­dends of $3.6 mil­lion from its new in­vest­ment in PPG­PL as part of a con­sor­tium that pur­chased Pan­west LLC own­ers of 10 per cent of PPG­PL. The pos­i­tive im­pact of these were par­tial­ly off­set by Pow­er­gen and NGC, NEL's earn­ings be­ing low­er than 2013."