Rhon­dor Dowlat

The Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny of T&T (Petrotrin) is one of the coun­try's three largest State En­ter­pris­es iden­ti­fied by the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) of Par­lia­ment to be fac­ing ma­jor Man­age­ment and Op­er­a­tional is­sues.

The oth­er two are the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) and the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott).

Ac­cord­ing to the chair­man of the JSC's State En­ter­pris­es, David Small, at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the J. Hamil­ton Mau­rice Room, Of­fice of the Par­lia­ment said that Petrotrin faced chal­lenges in Liq­uid­i­ty, Up­stream as­set, Down­stream plant cost and time es­ca­la­tion, As­set in­tegri­ty, Com­pe­tence gaps and suc­ces­sion plan­ning, Health and safe­ty per­for­mance and Debt bur­den ref­er­ence to ex­ist­ing bonds.

"Petrotrin has lega­cy prob­lems from as­sets to a whole set of op­er­a­tional chal­lenges. Petrotrin is a strong com­pa­ny in terms of as­sets but it has to find a way to un­lock the val­ues in those as­sets," Small said.

Small said there needs to be a plan put in place to make sure mis­takes don't hap­pen again, "they are strapped for as­sets in terms of mon­ey to be able to op­er­a­tionalise a lot of the re­sources. Petrotrin needs to sta­bilise be­fore it can grow."

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, it was rec­om­mend­ed that Petrotrin con­tin­ue to ex­plore av­enues for de­fer­ring the pay­ment of some of the bond com­mit­ments. In so do­ing, it can give it­self some breath­ing room to sta­bilise is rev­enue streams.

"The com­pa­ny should con­sid­er the en­gage­ment of a fi­nan­cial ad­vi­so­ry ser­vices firm to pro­vide rec­om­mend­ed strate­gies to man­age its debt port­fo­lio and it should ex­plore all op­tions to op­ti­mise its ex­ist­ing cost struc­ture with a view to re­liev­ing the pres­sure on its rev­enue streams," the re­port stat­ed.

In terms of project man­age­ment is­sues, the JSC rec­om­mend­ed Petrotrin to seek to con­duct a post-com­ple­tion tech­ni­cal and fi­nan­cial au­dit of all ma­jor projects to iden­ti­fy the root caus­es of the many and sev­er­al mas­sive cost and sched­ule over­runs ex­pe­ri­enced by sev­er­al projects un­der­tak­en by the com­pa­ny.

With re­spect to NGC, the com­mit­tee rec­om­mend­ed that it make pub­lic, the cur­rent sta­tus and fore­cast of like­ly gas de­liv­er­abil­i­ty to all its cus­tomers com­menc­ing March 2017, which would be up­dat­ed on a quar­ter­ly ba­sis.

With re­spect to Ude­cott, Small said it failed to pro­vide enough in­for­ma­tion, how­ev­er, not­ed that they had in­ter­nal chal­lenges in­clud­ing hu­man re­source and sys­tem­at­ic prob­lems.

Part of its rec­om­men­da­tion is that Ude­cott should ur­gent­ly in­sti­tute a prop­er da­ta man­age­ment and back­up sys­tem to mit­i­gate against a re­cur­rence of the is­sue of a pauci­ty of prop­er doc­u­men­ta­tion.