Asha Javeed

Lead Ed­i­tor In­ves­ti­ga­tions

asha.javeed@guardian.co.tt

For­mer in­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor David Small has made his de­par­ture from Ni­Quan En­er­gy but has signed a non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment with the com­pa­ny which pre­vents him from dis­cussing why he ex­it­ed the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that Small, a for­mer Ni­Quan vice pres­i­dent, is cur­rent­ly en­gaged in a le­gal wran­gle with Ni­Quan on his ex­it from the com­pa­ny.

In re­sponse to ques­tions by Guardian Me­dia last week, Small con­firmed he had ex­it­ed the or­gan­i­sa­tion but was abrupt and said he could not dis­cuss the mat­ter any fur­ther.

Small was the vice pres­i­dent of Ni­Quan for close to nine years. He joined the or­gan­i­sa­tion in 2013 and left in Oc­to­ber 2021 and em­ployed at the time of the April 2021 ex­plo­sion.

Ac­cord­ing to his so­cial me­dia pro­file, LinkedIn, Small said that as Ni­Quan’s vice pres­i­dent of Glob­al En­er­gy Ser­vices, he cham­pi­oned all as­pects of busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties on a glob­al scale.

He iden­ti­fied some of his high­lights at the firm as “fos­tered strong re­la­tion­ships with in­ter­na­tion­al gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials dur­ing the cre­ation of new project op­por­tu­ni­ties and ini­tia­tives. Gained their buy-in and sup­port and aligned all goals/ob­jec­tives.”

In ad­di­tion, he said he draft­ed and re­leased all ad­vo­ca­cy and gov­ern­ment core busi­ness de­vel­op­ment strate­gies.

“Con­tin­u­ous­ly im­proved their out­put and en­sured strate­gic align­ment with oth­er projects. Close­ly tracked project per­for­mance to time­lines and oth­er stake­hold­er re­quests. Drove the team to­ward suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion by re­mov­ing road­blocks and procur­ing ad­di­tion­al re­sources,” he said on his pro­file.

Small, who is now em­ployed as a prin­ci­pal con­sul­tant at David Small and As­so­ciates, has pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries (MEEI) and was a for­mer Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) di­rec­tor be­fore his turn as an in­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor.

Last week, Ni­Quan was hit with a pro­hi­bi­tion or­der by the Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Safe­ty and Health Au­thor­i­ty (OS­HA), af­ter 35-year-old pip­efit­ter Al­lan­lane Ramkissoon died af­ter he was burnt in a fire at the gas-to-liq­uids (GTL) plant in Pointe-a-Pierre.

In ad­di­tion, the min­istry has start­ed an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the in­ci­dent.

“I want to make it abun­dant­ly clear the Min­istry of En­er­gy is con­cerned, we have al­ways been con­cerned when­ev­er there are in­ci­dents, and with re­spect to this in­ci­dent with Ni­Quan we are con­cerned and we will make sure as far as we are able to there is no cov­er-up and that noth­ing is swept un­der the rug. Ni­Quan is now ­un­der a mi­cro­scope. No doubt about that,” En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said at a press con­fer­ence last week.

Ni­Quan is the vi­sion of its founder Ains­ley Gill, who bought the in­com­plete and aban­doned gas-to-liq­uids (GTL) plant from Petrotrin for $35 mil­lion af­ter it was rel­e­gat­ed to scrap iron.

The di­rec­tors of Ni­Quan En­er­gy Trinidad Ltd, as at the com­pa­nies 2022 an­nu­al re­turn, stamped on Au­gust 15, 2022 are: John An­drews, Al­i­son Lewis, Nicholas Galt, Lar­ry Fe­lix and Gill.

A June 5, 2023 doc­u­ment from Ni­Quan’s Com­pa­nies Reg­istry file la­belled ‘Re­turn of is­suance or trans­fer of shares’, in­di­cates 1,059,074 shares were is­sued to RBC Trust T&T with the list­ed amount of share cap­i­tal be­ing US$6,354,444. Some 10,697 shares were is­sued to First­line Se­cu­ri­ties Ltd that rep­re­sent­ed TT$10,697 of share cap­i­tal.