Gail Alexan­der

Is Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed a loss-mak­ing en­ti­ty?

That’s the query raised in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day by Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC), Sen­a­tor Wade Mark, af­ter he was told by Gov­ern­ment that Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny is “at times” self-suf­fi­cient and “at oth­er times” needs Gov­ern­ment sup­port to get for­eign ex­change.

The in­for­ma­tion was giv­en to him by Min­is­ter in Fi­nance Allyson West who said Gov­ern­ment had to give the com­pa­ny ac­cess to a Cen­tral Bank fa­cil­i­ty in 2019 to get for­eign ex­change.

She was re­ply­ing to Mark’s ques­tion which called for Gov­ern­ment in­di­cate the to­tal amount of mon­ey which Gov­ern­ment has had to pro­vide to Paria to cov­er its short­fall in for­eign cur­ren­cy need­ed for pro­cure­ment of fu­el sup­plies from De­cem­ber 2018 to Jan­u­ary 31, 2020.

West said in De­cem­ber 2018-19, Paria sourced for­eign ex­change in­ter­nal­ly through com­mer­cial banks as it had dif­fi­cul­ty in get­ting amounts of for­eign ex­change (Forex) re­quired. The com­pa­ny got ac­cess to a US Forex fa­cil­i­ty via Cen­tral Bank.

From June 2019 to Jan­u­ary 2020, Paria used it to ac­cess (US)$69 mil­lion to cov­er a short­fall in for­eign ex­change need­ed to cov­er fu­el sup­ply for the T&T mar­ket.

West said in Paria’s ini­tial op­er­a­tions, the com­pa­ny was self-suf­fi­cient re­gard­ing Forex, but from May 2019 it had dif­fi­cul­ty sourc­ing for­eign ex­change. She said this was why the Fi­nance Min­istry gave Paria ac­cess to the CBTT fa­cil­i­ty.

West said Paria is in the busi­ness of trad­ing in en­er­gy prod­ucts and its Forex needs vary due to type of en­er­gy prod­uct. She said the com­pa­ny is self–suf­fi­cient at times and at oth­er times may need Gov­ern­ment sup­port to get Forex.

Mark then asked if Paria was a loss-mak­ing en­ti­ty but the query wasn’t al­lowed by Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo.

On an­oth­er query, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan said the pro­posed Ni­quan plant in Point-a-Pierre, is ex­pect­ed to start com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions by Au­gust 30.

The amount of nat­ur­al gas which will be sup­plied to the plant is 31 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day. The con­tract is for ‘well be­yond’ 10 years, Khan said.

Khan who was ab­sent due to ill­ness in re­cent weeks said he was hap­py to re­turn to Sen­ate.

Mean­while the first or­der of Sen­ate busi­ness yes­ter­day was the de­c­la­ra­tion of the va­can­cy of the Sen­ate seat held by ex-Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte who re­signed from Cab­i­net last week.

Re­plac­ing him in the Sen­ate was PNM Barataria/ San Juan can­di­date Ja­son Williams who was seat­ed at the end of Gov­ern­ment’s back bench.