It is no sur­prise that Gov­ern­ment has once again re­ject­ed the of­fer from Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies to ac­quire the Pointe-a-Pierre Re­fin­ery.

This, from for­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter, Kevin Ram­nar­ie, who says based on what the Fi­nance Min­is­ter out­lined, the of­fer by Pa­tri­ot­ic was not fea­si­ble.

“This is my un­der­stand­ing of what the Min­is­ter de­scribed, yes­ter­day. He said two op­tions were pro­vid­ed—one was a tax cred­it op­tion, and the oth­er was a re­ceiv­ables op­tion,” Ram­nar­ine said.

“With the tax cred­it op­tion, the gov­ern­ment would have to is­su­ing US$750 mil­lion in tax cred­its to Pa­tri­ot­ic, who would then trans­fer that to Cred­it Su­isse, and Cred­it Su­isse could then sell that to any­body such as BP or Shell for ex­am­ple, who could then use it to re­duce their tax li­a­bil­i­ty in T&T,” he ex­plained.

“In ef­fect it would mean the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go giv­ing up some TT$5-$6 bil­lion in rev­enue,” he stat­ed, “which would mean the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go pay­ing for the re­fin­ery for Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies, who would then have an un­en­cum­bered re­fin­ery.”

Ram­nar­ine be­lieves that Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies failed to se­cure the fi­nances need­ed to com­plete the ne­go­ti­a­tion.

“It is clear that at no point in time they had ac­cess to US$700 mil­lion asked in the orig­i­nal of­fer, or the $500 mil­lion which rep­re­sents the Net Present Val­ue of the US$700 mil­lion over a ten-year pe­ri­od.  It is clear that at no point in time they had ac­cess to that mon­ey or had some con­crete guar­an­tee from a bank to pro­vide that mon­ey,” Kevin Ram­nar­ine points out.

The for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter says it is time to move on from Pa­tri­ot­ic and re­turn to the open mar­ket.

He notes, though, that Gov­ern­ment is do­ing so in a sce­nario where the glob­al re­fin­ing in­dus­try is in tremen­dous cri­sis.