Akash Sama­roo

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

Se­nior Re­porter

In a shock­ing rev­e­la­tion in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young claimed the Oil­fields Work­ers’ Trade Union’s (OW­TU) Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed failed to make the next round of bid­ding on the moth­balled Petrotrin re­fin­ery be­cause it lied about its fi­nan­cial stand­ing by sub­mit­ting a fake doc­u­ment to the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee tasked with re­ceiv­ing pro­pos­als.

Young made the com­ment a day af­ter OW­TU pres­i­dent gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get, at a me­dia con­fer­ence, sug­gest­ed the Gov­ern­ment was act­ing spite­ful­ly by re­ject­ing Pa­tri­ot­ic.

Speak­ing in yes­ter­day’s Bud­get de­bate, how­ev­er, Min­is­ter Young de­scribed Ro­get’s re­marks as “reck­less.”

Pro­vid­ing con­text be­fore re­veal­ing what he said was the re­al rea­son the com­pa­ny was not con­sid­ered, he ex­plained, “One of the things looked at, not us the Gov­ern­ment, the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee and Sco­tia out of Hous­ton, who are in­de­pen­dent ex­perts in this area, there were a num­ber of things they look at. Any ex­pe­ri­ence in re­fin­ing? Any ex­pe­ri­ence in oil? An­oth­er one is do you have the fi­nan­cial where­with­al?”

Reach­ing for a doc­u­ment in front of him, Young said, “You know things ar­rive in your mail­box.”

He then bran­dished a piece of pa­per to the Low­er House, de­clar­ing, “I have in my hand here to­day what ap­pears to be a swift mes­sage of a cash wire trans­fer of USD$1.5 bil­lion on be­half of Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nol­o­gy Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, re­ceiv­ing USD$1.5 bil­lion at a lo­cal bank in Trinidad.”

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter said the Gov­ern­ment asked the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee what was the is­sue with Pa­tri­ot­ic’s bid if the com­pa­ny showed it had that sum of mon­ey in its ac­count.

“So, of course, we asked the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee ‘well, if they had this what hap­pened?’ Fraud­u­lent doc­u­ment. A fake doc­u­ment pro­duced as part of that EOI (ex­pres­sion of in­ter­est) process. Forged doc­u­ment, be­cause when the due dili­gence was done, of course, no USD$1.5 bil­lion was re­ceived by Pa­tri­ot­ic at any lo­cal bank. So, un­for­tu­nate­ly, and yes, it is stamped by some un­known per­son, cer­ti­fied true, but, of course, it is easy to cer­ti­fy this,” Young claimed while those on the Gov­ern­ment au­di­bly ex­pressed their shock at the dis­clo­sure.

Young said he was so con­fi­dent in the doc­u­men­ta­tion he was pro­vid­ed with that he was will­ing to re­peat what he said in pub­lic, where he does not have par­lia­men­tary priv­i­lege.

“Be­cause it is ei­ther it ex­ists or does not ex­ist. And I can stand here with­out fear of con­tra­dic­tion here and out­side, as I might do lat­er on, and say it is not a re­al doc­u­ment. So there­fore, un­for­tu­nate­ly, they could not move for­ward be­cause the doc­u­ment that was pro­duced as proof of fi­nan­cials is not re­al. Fake, fraud, fraud­u­lent and that Mr Deputy Speak­er, through you to the pop­u­la­tion, is the truth as to why Pa­tri­ot­ic could not make it to the next hur­dle,” he pro­claimed.

Ear­li­er on, Young said Pa­tri­ot­ic was, in fact, even giv­en pref­er­en­tial treat­ment by the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee.

“The ques­tion was asked; did they pass the fi­nan­cials? I was told by the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee, the first time, no, they could not pro­duce the fi­nan­cial where­with­al on this oc­ca­sion as part of their EOI process. And the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee did some­thing, cred­it to them, that they didn’t do for oth­ers, they told Pa­tri­ot­ic take some time and go and see if you can get the fi­nan­cials be­cause what you pro­duced as the ini­tial pass can’t work. And they gave them more time and they gave them a sec­ond op­por­tu­ni­ty,” Young ex­plained.

He said it was on this sec­ond op­por­tu­ni­ty that the al­leged fake doc­u­ment was sub­mit­ted.

Fur­ther at­tempt­ing to sup­port the claim that Pa­tri­ot­ic was not vic­timised by the Gov­ern­ment, Young said, “The first time we went out in 2018/2019, Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies, an OW­TU-formed com­pa­ny, was the pre­ferred bid­der. We gave them a pe­ri­od of ex­clu­siv­i­ty, they could not, un­for­tu­nate­ly, get over the hur­dle even though we worked with them.

“There were two things, one was that one of their part­ners want­ed ex­clu­siv­i­ty to the Paria tank farms, we weren’t pre­pared to do that, the sec­ond was they want­ed Gov­ern­ment to is­sue bonds on their be­half as part of the fi­nanc­ing, that is putting the tax­pay­ers right back where we had tak­en them out from.”

Min­is­ter Young ar­gued that while any re­spon­si­ble gov­ern­ment would want to restart the re­fin­ery, they were not go­ing to put tax­pay­ers in a po­si­tion where they were in­cur­ring bil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es as a re­sult.

The cho­sen bid­ders for the re­fin­ery were al­so re­vealed by the Fi­nance Min­is­ter dur­ing the Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion and in­clude CRO Con­sor­tium, a Trinidad-based group made up of DR Com­modi­ties Ltd, Chemie-Tech and Ocala; US-based iN­ca En­er­gy LLC; and Nige­ria-based Dan­do PLC. These se­lec­tions were made by Sco­tia Cap­i­tal (USA) and an eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee.

Union to re­spond to­day

Ef­forts to con­tact Ro­get and OW­TU Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer Ozzi War­wick for a com­ment on Young’s claim yes­ter­day were un­suc­cess­ful. How­ev­er, Sta­cy Her­bert, of the Ed­u­ca­tion and Re­search De­part­ment, last evening said they would re­spond to­day.