At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan is hail­ing the ar­bi­tra­tion pro­ceed­ings be­tween State-owned Petrotrin and World GTL Inc (WGTL) and WGTL St Lu­cia as a "sig­nif­i­cant vic­to­ry" in which the tri­bunal de­ter­mined that the clean en­er­gy com­pa­ny should pay Petrotrin's le­gal costs of $14.5 mil­lion.

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar first an­nounced news of the tri­bunal rul­ing at the UNC's Mon­day Night Fo­rum at Tul­sa Trace Hin­du School in Pe­nal where she said the project cost Petrotrin $2.7 bil­lion, for which to date the com­pa­ny has noth­ing to show. In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day by the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, Ram­lo­gan stat­ed the tri­bunal is­sued an award:

• de­clar­ing that WGTL Inc and WGTL St Lu­cia breached their re­spec­tive oblig­a­tions un­der the guar­an­tee con­tri­bu­tion agree­ment (GCA) by fail­ing to trans­fer shares of WGTL Trinidad up­on the sec­ond an­niver­sary of the date on which each over-con­tri­bu­tion ad­vance was made, and fail­ing to take steps re­quired to en­sure that such shares were is­sued

• or­der­ing WGTL to trans­fer 9,398,211 com­mon shares of WGTL Trinidad to Petrotrin

• or­der­ing WGTL to trans­fer ad­di­tion­al com­mon shares of WGTL Trinidad to Petrotrin as com­pen­sa­tion for in­ter­est ac­crued on the un­paid over-con­tri­bu­tion ad­vances,

• and, or­der­ing WGTL?to pay Petrotrin's le­gal costs to­talling $14,588,875

In Sep­tem­ber 2005, Petrotrin en­tered in­to a project agree­ment with WGTL to build and op­er­ate a gas-to-liq­uid plant on Petrotrin's re­fin­ery com­pound at Pointe-a-Pierre. "WGTL Trinidad was in­cor­po­rat­ed as the project com­pa­ny which en­tered in­to a cred­it agree­ment with Cred­it Su­isse for a loan. That agree­ment pro­vid­ed, among oth­er mat­ters, that by Ju­ly 12, 2009-the date cer­tain-the project had to be suf­fi­cient­ly com­plet­ed to pro­duce a cer­tain amount of diesel.

"In the event that the re­quired amount of diesel was not pro­duced by that date, the loan be­came im­me­di­ate­ly due and payable," read the AG's state­ment. The AG not­ed that sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Petrotrin agreed to pay off GTL's share of the guar­an­tee loss in the event it de­fault­ed. This meant that Petrotrin would be li­able and re­spon­si­ble for GTL's debt.

"GTL had to re­pay Petrotrin with­in one year. If it failed to do so and more than two years had elapsed, GTL was to trans­fer some of its shares in the project com­pa­ny to Petrotrin in ac­cor­dance with a for­mu­la set out in GCA," the AG stat­ed. Ram­lo­gan said in the state­ment "the project was mis­man­aged and did not pro­ceed ac­cord­ing to plan."

"There were, in­cred­i­bly, a to­tal of 33 cost over­runs. In each case, WGTL was un­able to fund its por­tion of the cost over­runs. In every case, Petrotrin had to step in with its own funds to pay WGTL's share of monies due. "In to­tal, Petrotrin paid the stag­ger­ing sum of over $600 mil­lion on be­half of WGTL in ad­di­tion to con­tri­bu­tions on its be­half of over $580 mil­lion.

"At all stages, WGTL re­fused to trans­fer to Petrotrin any shares in the project com­pa­ny, de­spite WGTL's clear oblig­a­tion to do so," the AG stat­ed. The ar­bi­tra­tors in­clud­ed four Queen's coun­sels from Eng­land and Cana­da, and se­nior at­tor­neys from New York.