The au­dit in­to the mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar loss at the Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny (NP) be­gan un­der the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship and the man re­spon­si­ble “prompt­ly re­signed”.

For­mer NP chair­man, Neil Go­sine on Sun­day re­spond­ed to two Guardian Me­dia re­ports that de­tailed the loss of mon­ey and gas oil at the State-en­ter­prise.

Last Mon­day, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed that out­go­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Bernard Mitchell re­ferred to the fi­nan­cial hit and the au­dit in his good­bye email to staff. At that time Mitchell said that the NP paid over US$500,000 in that deal.

How­ev­er when Guardian Me­dia ob­tained a copy of that au­dit it re­vealed that NP was ac­tu­al­ly forced to write off more than $8 mil­lion on the soured deal with a non-ex­is­tent Suri­name-based com­pa­ny.

Go­sine in a text mes­sage on Sun­day said he was writ­ing to “clear up some mis­in­for­ma­tion in the ar­ti­cle”. His de­fence though seemed built on the fact that the board ap­point­ed by the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ini­ti­at­ed the au­dit and not the PNM-ap­point­ed board.

This was nev­er in dis­pute as, on Sun­day, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed that the au­dit was launched in March 2015 but nev­er spec­i­fied un­der which Gov­ern­ment.

Go­sine said that “it was the PP Board in late 2014 that launched the in­ves­ti­ga­tion which in­clud­ed the in­ter­nal au­dit and took ac­tion up­on re­ceipt of the re­port.

“This was not done by the PNM board. What the PNM board did is write off the debt in 2019 un­der the cur­rent/out­go­ing CEO,” Go­sine said.

He said that the “pre­vi­ous board was not to blame for this loss”.

“The then gen­er­al man­ag­er, busi­ness ven­ture failed to fol­low prop­er pro­ce­dure and due dili­gence and failed to ob­tain the rel­e­vant board ap­provals. Dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion was ini­ti­at­ed and warn­ing let­ters were is­sued,” he said.

“The PP’s board in­struct­ed NP’s man­age­ment to take the nec­es­sary steps to lo­cate the di­rec­tors of the Black Gold in Guyana and to com­mence le­gal pro­ceed­ings for breach of con­tract,” he said.

“I am at a loss to un­der­stand the nexus be­tween the in­ter­nal con­flict be­tween the cur­rent chair­man and cur­rent out­go­ing CEO and the ac­tion tak­en by the pre­vi­ous board of di­rec­tors,” he said.

“Such an im­pli­ca­tion of wrong­do­ing is with­out mer­it as every­thing was done above board and in ac­cor­dance with prop­er pro­ce­dure,” Go­sine said.

On Sun­day, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed that the au­dit showed that the Suri­name-based Black Gold, was less than three months old and yet was still able to get over $4 mil­li­on in bunker fu­el from State-owned NP for free in 2014.

The com­pa­ny was reg­is­tered in Suri­name in Jan­u­ary 2014 and by March was in dis­cus­sions with NP for the sale of gas oil out­side of T&T, which was not part of NP’s busi­ness purview.

By 2019, the state com­pa­ny suf­fered an ad­di­tion­al loss of over $3 mil­li­on in fi­nance charges on that same bad deal be­fore the com­pa­ny de­cid­ed to write off the loss.

Ac­cord­ing to the au­dit, NP was left hold­ing the fol­low­ing mul­ti-mil­li­on bag:

•Sale US $633,661.64

•Fi­nance charges US $584,572.87

•To­tal loss US $1,218,234.51.

The cur­rent board took the de­ci­sion to write off that mul­ti-mil­lion loss af­ter be­ing un­able to lo­cate the Suri­name-based com­pa­ny since the date of the deal.