Tax­pay­ers are spend­ing around half a mil­lion dol­lars month­ly to main­tain the now-de­funct Petrotrin Re­fin­ery at Pointe-a-Pierre while a new op­er­a­tor is be­ing sought.

The ques­tion on preser­va­tion costs was posed yes­ter­day by Rush­ton Paray, in his ca­pac­i­ty as vice-chair of the Pub­lic Ac­counts and En­ter­pris­es Com­mit­tee (PAEC), dur­ing an in­quiry in­to the au­dit­ed con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments of Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (TPHL) for the year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2019.

“The month­ly cost is about $500,000,” said New­man George, chair­man of the Guaracara Re­fin­ing Com­pa­ny (GRC), one of the four sub­sidiaries of TPHL.

Fol­low­ing his an­swer, there were mut­ter­ings from the PAEC com­mit­tee ques­tion­ing what cur­ren­cy George used in his an­swer.

“TT (dol­lars), I speak in TT,” George added.

“You speak in dif­fer­ent tongues, sir?” asked PAEC mem­ber Kei­th Scot­land some­what cheek­i­ly.

“No, I speak in one tongue sir,” George re­spond­ed.

Paray then asked if Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um fund­ed the al­most $6 mil­lion an­nu­al main­te­nance fee but George said GRC paid that bill, but with mon­ey from oth­er TPHL sub­sidiaries.

“We have a se­ries of lease arrange­ments with Paria and Her­itage, we have tank stor­age et cetera which we gen­er­ate that in­come from,” George ex­plained.

GRC over­sees the preser­va­tion of re­fin­ery as­sets and pro­vides util­i­ty ser­vices to Paria Fu­el Trad­ing.

Paray ques­tioned if get­ting this bill off their books is now a fur­ther in­cen­tive to find a new own­er to take full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the re­fin­ery’s as­sets.

TPHL chair­man Michael Quam­i­na an­swered, “Ab­solute­ly, there is no greater dri­ving force in so far as the re­fin­ery is con­cerned in try­ing to get some­body to take it over. I don’t even think there are dri­ving forces more sig­nif­i­cant than that. And there are ad­di­tion­al costs, we have the Bank of No­va Sco­tia out of Hous­ton that are con­sul­tants that go through each bid and as­sist with the as­sess­ments of these bids.”

Quam­i­na said this was the most progress they had made in find­ing a new re­fin­ery own­er and told the PAEC that sev­er­al prospects had come for­ward.

This in­evitably led to Paray ask­ing if TPHL would share how many bid­ders were in the run­ning.

Paria gen­er­al man­ag­er Mush­taq Mo­hammed re­spond­ed, “Cur­rent­ly, we have had eight ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est for the pur­chase/lease/restart­ing of the re­fin­ery.”

Mo­hammed said they al­so re­ceived un­so­licit­ed pro­pos­als.

Paray pressed to as­cer­tain when a pre­ferred bid­der would be an­nounced.

“Our process is that we ex­pect non-bind­ing of­fers from 10th May and from then we will re­view those of­fers and un­der­stand the way for­ward,” Mo­hammed said.

Paray asked how many of the bid­ders were lo­cal com­pa­nies.

“I would say at this time, all of them have a com­po­si­tion of lo­cal and for­eign par­tic­i­pa­tion,” Mo­hammed said.

Mean­while, ear­li­er in the sit­ting, Quam­i­na said theft and van­dal­ism at the re­fin­ery had dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly since the Gov­ern­ment sought to reg­u­late the cop­per and scrap iron in­dus­try. He said TPHL’s sub­sidiaries were al­so op­er­at­ing with greater syn­er­gy and now se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel from Her­itage of­ten pa­trolled the for­mer Petrotrin com­pound as well.