GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Fi­nal pro­pos­als from the three short-list­ed bid­ders in­ter­est­ed in the sale or lease of the state-owned Petrotrin re­fin­ery are ex­pect­ed to be sub­mit­ted on Jan­u­ary 27.

This was dis­closed yes­ter­day by gen­er­al man­ag­er at Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd Mush­taq Mo­hammed, who added that meet­ings are al­so planned with the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee for Feb­ru­ary 6 and 7 to re­view the fi­nal sub­mis­sions by these three of­fer­ers.

Mo­hammed made the state­ments at the Pub­lic Ac­counts (En­ter­pris­es) Com­mit­tee which en­tailed an ex­am­i­na­tion of the con­sol­i­dat­ed au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments of Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd (TPHL) for the year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2019, with spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence to Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Ltd and Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd.

Last year, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert not­ed that the three com­pa­nies have been short­list­ed from an ini­tial pool of 10 bid­ders. The com­pa­nies are CRO Con­sor­tium, a lo­cal­ly based con­sor­tium com­pris­ing three com­pa­nies, DR Com­modi­ties Ltd, Chemie-Tech and Ocala; IN­CA En­er­gy LLC, a com­pa­ny based in the USA; and Oan­do PLC, a com­pa­ny based in Nige­ria.

This is Gov­ern­ment’s third at­tempt to sell or lease the re­fin­ery.

Dur­ing the dis­cus­sions the sta­tus of out­stand­ing con­sol­i­dat­ed au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments for Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd (TPHL) was brought to the fore.

TPHL is vest­ed with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of man­ag­ing T&T’s oil and re­lat­ed as­sets. Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um has four sub­sidiaries – Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Ltd; Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd; Guaracara Re­fin­ery Ltd and Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny of T&T (Petrotrin). Com­mit­tee’s chair­man Sen­a­tor Wade Mark took TPHL to task for fail­ure to pro­vide con­sol­i­dat­ed au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ment since 2019.

He then called on TPHL’s chair­man Michael Quam­i­na SC to state what was pre­vent­ing the au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments of the Guaracara and Petrotrin from be­ing sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry of Fi­nance. All state­ments from the four en­ti­ties must be sub­mit­ted to for­mu­late the en­tire con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial state­ment for the TPHL. In re­sponse, Quam­i­na said the tran­si­tion­ing and re­struc­tur­ing of Petrotrin have posed sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges for the au­dit­ing of the fi­nan­cial state­ments.

The com­mit­tee was as­sured that all ef­forts were be­ing made to com­plete all state­ments in a time­ly man­ner.