Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

Five years fol­low­ing Petrotin’s clo­sure, there con­tin­ue to be calls for im­pact as­sess­ments on this ma­jor de­ci­sion. Be­yond job loss­es, ex­perts con­tend there have been lan­guish­ing con­se­quences to fence­line com­mu­ni­ties who de­pend­ed on the now de­funct State-owned oil com­pa­ny for in­come.

Dur­ing an on­line sym­po­sium host­ed by the Oil­fields Work­ers’ Trade Union en­ti­tled “Petrotrin 5 years Lat­er” yes­ter­day, econ­o­mist Dr Mar­lene Attz said stud­ies about the im­pli­ca­tions from the fall­out must be con­duct­ed with the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic al­so be­ing fac­tored in.

She not­ed that com­mu­ni­ties and the coun­try at large can­not af­ford to lose any more com­mer­cial ac­tiv­i­ty.

“The domi­no im­pact on the com­mu­ni­ty and the mul­ti­pli­er im­pact could be sig­nif­i­cant. So we talk­ing about un­em­ploy­ment in San­ta Flo­ra and Pa­lo Seco and those ar­eas, and it could be a com­bi­na­tion of per­sons who have found them­selves not be­ing able to earn liveli­hoods as a re­sult of the Petrotrin clo­sure and it could be oth­er causal fac­tors,” Attz said.

“In that pe­ri­od, we al­so had COVID-19, which would have ex­ac­er­bat­ed some things that may have start­ed as a re­sult of the clo­sure of Petrotin.

“One of the con­cerns I have is per­sons who may have fall­en off of the ed­u­ca­tion grid be­cause of COVID-1,9 so they now find them­selves with a dou­ble wham­my. One is that they might not be able to ac­cess em­ploy­ment that may have been a spin-off ac­tiv­i­ty that Petrotrin was in­volved in.”

The com­pa­ny’s for­mer chair­man Wil­fred Es­pinet told OW­TU of­fi­cials that No­vem­ber 30, 2018, was the day the com­pa­ny would cease op­er­a­tions and that per­ma­nent em­ploy­ees would re­ceive their ter­mi­na­tion pack­ages in ac­cor­dance with the rel­e­vant col­lec­tive agree­ments.

Pri­or to be­ing shut down, the re­fin­ery faced is­sues re­lat­ing to al­leged mis­man­age­ment, low pro­duc­tion and in­creas­ing debt.

Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed and Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny lat­er re­placed Petrotrin.

Co­or­di­na­tor of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers Jai Lelad­hars­ingh al­so ques­tioned the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion.

“Paria is in charge of the ac­tu­al im­port­ing of the fu­el. How much for­eign ex­change is ex­pend­ed where that is con­cerned? Yes, we have debt, we have for­eign debt but the thing is from a net ex­porter, we changed the mod­el to a net im­porter and to us in the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, that does not make any sense,” Lelad­hars­ingh said.

Mean­while, OW­TU’s Pointe-A-Pierre branch sec­re­tary An­tho­ny Dop­son stat­ed that in­for­ma­tion ob­tained through the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act, sug­gest­ed that Paria Fu­el Com­pa­ny spent over US$900 mil­lion be­tween De­cem­ber 2018 and Sep­tem­ber 2019, point­ing to the com­pa­ny’s cost­ly im­port bill.

Dop­son claimed records point­ed to oth­er pe­ri­ods of the com­pa­ny’s climb­ing im­por­ta­tion costs.

“When Paria im­ports those prod­ucts pur­chased in US dol­lars, they sold it to NP (Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um) and Unipet and got TT dol­lars. The TT dol­lars that would have amount­ed for that fis­cal year would have been 3.3 bil­lion US dol­lars and what Paria al­so does is sell to the re­gion­al mar­kets and the sales would have amount­ed to 506 mil­lion US dol­lars, amount­ing to a to­tal loss in USD to 378 mil­lion USD for that fis­cal pe­ri­od, which is Oc­to­ber 2019 to Sep­tem­ber 2020,” he claimed.