PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

The cur­rent chair­man and the board of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NGC) are not to be blamed for the re­cent bil­lion dol­lar loss in­curred by the state-owned com­pa­ny, Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young said yes­ter­day.

Young came to the de­fence of chair­man Dr Joseph Ish­mael Khan and the board of NGC at a press con­fer­ence at his Min­istry's head­quar­ters at Tow­er D in Port of Spain yes­ter­day.

Ear­li­er this week, UNC MP David Lee said the pub­lic should keep an eye on the NGC chair­man af­ter the com­pa­ny re­port­ed a loss of $1.3 bil­lion for fi­nan­cial year 2023, and not­ed it had sim­i­lar­ly re­port­ed a loss in 2021.

"Ab­solute­ly no part of the 2023 loss­es in­curred by NGC group have any­thing to do the cur­rent board of di­rec­tors, the cur­rent man­age­ment of NGC, or the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad. And to­day I want to make that point abun­dant­ly clear. So this per­son­alised at­tack, which seems un­for­tu­nate­ly to be the modus operan­di of those on the oth­er side is com­plete­ly re­ject­ed.," said Young, who ex­plained that the loss­es are not re­lat­ed to NGC's cur­rent op­er­a­tions but bad con­tracts that had been signed over a decade ago.

Those con­tracts in­clud­ed a nat­ur­al gas sup­ply con­tract ne­go­ti­at­ed by the NGC with Caribbean Gas Chem­i­cal Ltd (CG­CL), which is ma­jor­i­ty owned by a con­sor­tium of com­pa­nies of Japan’s gi­ant Mit­subishi Group.

The en­er­gy min­is­ter said the loss­es by NGC in 2023 were pri­mar­i­ly at­trib­ut­able to the pur­chase by it of the 39 per cent share­hold­ing in Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Ltd owned by US en­er­gy gi­ant Cono­coPhillips, which he said were over­val­ued in 2013.

"And sec­ond­ly, one of the worst con­tracts a gov­ern­ment that has en­tered in­to any en­er­gy sec­tor in 2014/2015 with CG­CL, which con­tin­ues to cost us, the cit­i­zens, bil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es, and will con­tin­ue the ac­coun­tants say. And that is the truth as to why NGC has suf­fered these loss­es," said Young, who point­ed out that the NGC had been on course to record a prof­it if these con­tracts were not in place.

"You have the com­par­a­tive ac­counts the first nine months of 2024 for NGC, where they have de­clared just un­der a bil­lion dol­lars were made, in prof­it af­ter tax. The NGC group has con­tin­ued to pay all of its tax­es," said Young, who added that the Gov­ern­ment and NGC have been work­ing to en­sure that the com­pa­ny can con­tin­ue to gen­er­ate rev­enues and prof­its in the long run.

Young said he was large­ly sat­is­fied by the per­for­mance of state en­ti­ties in the en­er­gy sec­tor, al­though he ad­mit­ted he want­ed Her­itage to do more.

"Her­itage has done well in terms of sta­bil­is­ing it­self. For­tu­nate­ly, we've seen oil pro­duc­tion in­crease a few thou­sand bar­rel the over the last cou­ple of months," said Young.

"I met with the chair­man of Her­itage and speak­ing to them be­ing more ag­gres­sive to be able to bring in more oil for us, the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go, I'm try­ing to push them a lit­tle hard­er, for them to do a bit more. They've done well, but you can al­ways keep push­ing. So I am sat­is­fied, if I had to grade the en­er­gy sec­tor at the end of the year. I'm very sat­is­fied by what has been achieved in terms of lin­ing up and se­cur­ing our fu­ture."