S&P Glob­al Rat­ings has up­grad­ed its rat­ings on Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd.

On Wednes­day (June 1) S&P Glob­al Rat­ings re­moved its rat­ings on Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd from Cred­it­Watch with de­vel­op­ing im­pli­ca­tions and raised its Is­suer cred­it rat­ing on the com­pa­ny with a two notch up­grade to ‘BB’ from ‘B+’.

S&P Glob­al al­so as­signed a fi­nal ‘BB’ is­suer cred­it and is­sue lev­el rat­ing to Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Ltd (Her­itage), the main op­er­at­ing sub­sidiary of TPHL.

The out­look for both TPHL and Her­itage is “neg­a­tive” to mir­ror that of the sov­er­eign rat­ing of T&T (BBB- / Neg­a­tive / A-3).

Her­itage con­tributes ap­prox­i­mate­ly 87 per cent of TPHL’s to­tal Earn­ings Be­fore In­ter­est, Tax­es, De­pre­ci­a­tion and Amor­ti­za­tion (EBIT­DA) and ac­count­ed for about 58 per cent of the coun­try’s to­tal oil pro­duc­tion in Fis­cal Year (FY) 2021.

“In May 2022, Her­itage closed its US $500 mil­lion se­nior se­cured notes trans­ac­tion and US $475 mil­lion new term loan which en­abled it to re­fi­nance TPHL’s debt and im­ple­ment a com­fort­able, low­er cost and longer-term debt ma­tu­ri­ty sched­ule fol­low­ing the re­fi­nanc­ing ex­er­cise,” a re­lease from TPHL stat­ed yes­ter­day.

“These new debt is­suances have ex­clud­ed from any lien re­serves, and im­por­tant­ly, prop­er­ty not re­quired for core busi­ness op­er­a­tions.

“In ad­di­tion, af­ter TPHL re­fi­nanced most of its li­a­bil­i­ties through Her­itage, TPHL no longer has the ad­min­is­tra­tive de­fault that forced it to clas­si­fy to­tal li­a­bil­i­ties as short-term,” it stat­ed.

S&P Glob­al al­so with­drew its is­sue-lev­el rat­ings on TPHL’s 9.75 per cent se­nior se­cured notes due 2026 and 6 per cent se­nior un­se­cured se­nior notes due 2022 af­ter full re­pay­ment in the re­cent re­fi­nanc­ing ex­er­cise.

Chair­man of TPHL and Her­itage Michael Quam­i­na com­ment­ed “We are very pleased with this most re­cent up­grade. Against the back­drop of in­creased oil prices on the world mar­ket and Her­itage’s plans for in­creased pro­duc­tion, we look for­ward to max­imis­ing re­turns for the peo­ple of T&T.”