Gail Alexan­der

Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ings Ltd (TPHL) has iden­ti­fied a pre­ferred bid­der for the Guaracara re­fin­ery and talks are on­go­ing.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley con­firmed this in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, in re­ply­ing to queries from Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress MP David Lee.

The En­er­gy Min­istry re­cent­ly stat­ed that the four bid­ders for the re­fin­ery would have been giv­en un­til April to sub­mit re­vised pro­pos­als.

It's the lat­est at­tempt to get an op­er­a­tor and re­open the re­fin­ery since it was closed in 2018 and sub­se­quent ef­forts by Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies to get the re­fin­ery failed.

Yes­ter­day, Row­ley said fur­ther pro­pos­als of the four bid­ders were re­ceived and eval­u­at­ed.

Af­ter eval­u­a­tion, the TPHL has iden­ti­fied a pre­ferred bid­der and is cur­rent­ly pur­su­ing dis­cus­sions with this en­ti­ty.

Giv­en the na­ture of the mat­ter, Row­ley, at this stage, couldn’t give a time­line for com­ple­tion and said he wouldn’t guess about it.

On oth­er queries, Row­ley said the sale of Trinci­ty Mall will be “im­mi­nent­ly launched” and he was told that was the work of the liq­uida­tor of the prop­er­ty - but not­ed the mall isn't un­der Gov­ern­ment's con­trol.

Row­ley said the mall is un­der the con­trol of the liq­uida­tor of CL Fi­nan­cial through Home Con­struc­tion Ltd and it wasn’t even ad­ver­tised for sale yet, “... far less sold.”

He said the liq­uida­tor ob­tained ex­ter­nal stake­hold­ers’ ap­proval for sale, sought and got court sanc­tion for sale. Meet­ings were held by the liq­uida­tor re­gard­ing the di­vest­ment strat­e­gy and the agent has pro­vid­ed draft sale doc­u­men­ta­tion to the liq­uida­tor for re­view and con­sid­er­a­tion.

On UNC MP Rudy In­dars­ingh's query about whether the cell phone "grab­bers and jam­mers (G&J)" tech­nol­o­gy in pris­ons is func­tion­ing, Row­ley said he'd not­ed a trend de­vel­op­ing where an Op­po­si­tion mem­ber had al­so asked the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter to say where cam­eras weren't work­ing. He was con­cerned that an­swer­ing such queries - in­clud­ing about the prison tech­nol­o­gy - could as­sist crim­i­nals.

On UNC MP Rod­ney Charles' query on if Row­ley was com­fort­able to have the pow­er of the G&J tech­nol­o­gy in the hands of the "po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed" (sic) Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency" where the SSA di­rec­tor was Cab­i­net-ap­point­ed, Row­ley said, "So you know it's in the SSA's hands and you de­ter­mined the SSA is po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed? Your mis­chief knows no bounds!"

"So what?" he added, say­ing SSA of­fi­cers ap­point­ed by this Gov­ern­ment are ap­point­ed the same way of­fi­cers were ap­point­ed un­der the UNC gov­ern­ment.

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