Cur­tis Williams

Ger­vase Warn­er, pres­i­dent and group chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Neal and Massy, is con­fi­dent his com­pa­ny can work with the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) and res­i­dents of La Brea to treat with any en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns they may have with the con­struc­tion of a US$600 mil­lion ver­ti­cal­ly in­te­grat­ed iron and steel com­plex on Union Es­tate. Speak­ing yes­ter­day to jour­nal­ists at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Warn­er said: "While we are on­ly at the fea­si­bil­i­ty stage of this project, we are con­fi­dent that if we find that the project makes sense, we will be able to work with the com­mu­ni­ty in La Brea to make sure that this is a win-win project for us all. "We have the ex­pe­ri­ence and in­ter­est in con­sult­ing with lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties in which we op­er­ate to take con­cerns and in­ter­est in­to con­sid­er­a­tion. As a good cit­i­zen of T&T, we will al­so be keen­ly in­ter­est­ed that our project meets and ex­ceeds the en­vi­ron­men­tal re­quire­ments of our coun­try." Two weeks ago, the com­pa­ny an­nounced the joint ven­ture part­ner­ship that in­cludes Russ­ian firm Sev­er­stal In­ter­na­tion­al, and Met­al­dom from the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic.

The con­sor­tium pro­pos­es to con­struct a di­rect re­duced iron/hot bri­quet­ted iron plant that will have a nom­i­nal ca­pac­i­ty of 1.5 mil­lion tonnes per year and the in­te­gra­tion of a steel mill with a nom­i­nal pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of up to 300,000 tonnes per year of steel bil­lets. The project is sim­i­lar to the Es­sar Steel project that saw sig­nif­i­cant protests by en­vi­ron­men­tal groups and re­sult­ed in the EMA turn­ing down the con­struc­tion ap­proval. Asked why he felt this would be any dif­fer­ent from what hap­pened in the case of Es­sar, Warn­er said the dif­fer­ence was that Neal and Massy was a lo­cal com­pa­ny with a fo­cused ap­proach. He said: "We can't af­ford to have peo­ple boy­cott shop­ping in Hi-Lo be­cause they ob­ject to our en­vi­ron­men­tal record on this project. So, in short, we have more skin in the game." Warn­er said the EMA had its role to play in the project and the part­ners in­tend­ed to work with the au­thor­i­ty rather than adopt an an­tag­o­nis­tic ap­proach. Matal­dom's port­fo­lio man­ag­er, in­dus­try and en­er­gy, Rafael Valez, said his com­pa­ny was at­tract­ed by T&T's low­er en­er­gy costs, in­clud­ing the cost the com­pa­ny is ex­pect­ed to pay for pow­er from Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed and the nat­ur­al gas prices.