For­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is deny­ing claims by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie that the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion spent over $120 mil­lion on ne­go­ti­a­tions for the Drag­on gas project with noth­ing to show for it.

“For an At­tor­ney Gen­er­al to be at­tempt­ing to so mis­lead the pop­u­la­tion, that is a fright­en­ing thing. Re­plac­ing the En­er­gy Min­is­ter, he is there as the font of the in­for­ma­tion, and he is tak­ing the po­si­tion to halt­ing­ly mum­ble and lie to the pop­u­la­tion; this is a se­ri­ous mat­ter,” Row­ley said dur­ing a press brief­ing at his Glen­coe home yes­ter­day

At a news con­fer­ence on Thurs­day, Je­re­mie said T&T was grant­ed a six-month win­dow un­der a new­ly is­sued Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) li­cence from the Unit­ed States Trea­sury De­part­ment.

The de­vel­op­ment will al­low the Gov­ern­ment and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) to for­mal­ly en­gage in ne­go­ti­a­tions with Venezuela on the de­vel­op­ment of the Drag­on gas field.

Ac­cord­ing to Je­re­mie, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress Gov­ern­ment se­cured the li­cence for less than half a mil­lion dol­lars com­pared to what was spent by the PNM.

But yes­ter­day, Row­ley ac­cused Je­re­mie of mis­lead­ing the pub­lic and fail­ing to ac­count for the pri­or in­vest­ments made to de­vel­op the deal.

“There is no way that we would have spent one hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars on this is­sue, as Mr Je­re­mie would have said, and if you com­pare ap­ples with ap­ples, where he said they spent half a mil­lion dol­lars, I don’t know on what, but since he said that, you may want to ask him what did you spend it on?”

In pro­vid­ing an ac­count, Row­ley con­firmed that NGC made a one-mil­lion-dol­lar pay­ment, as was re­quired to be a part­ner in the mat­ter. He al­so out­lined that oth­er cost fac­tors in­clud­ed le­gal fees.

“There would have been a pay­ment of a sign-on, a bonus pay­ment. From where I sat, that pay­ment may have been in the or­der of 4 or 5 mil­lion USD, Mis­ter Young can help you with that, and of course, the Gov­ern­ment, who now has the files. But don’t take what the AG said be­cause he is on a frol­ic of his own, and the oth­er pay­ment, a small amount of pay­ment would have been spent on look­ing at the in­tegri­ty of the Hi­bis­cus plat­form. You would have had lawyers, le­gal fees, and again the le­gal fees would have been in the or­der of 2 or 3 mil­lion USD.”

Row­ley out­lined what he de­scribed as a “long, strate­gic, and de­ter­mined pur­suit” to se­cure ac­cess to gas from Venezuela’s Drag­on field, an ef­fort, he said, that be­gan in 2016 un­der the PNM and cul­mi­nat­ed in the re­cent grant­i­ng of an OFAC li­cence by the US. He traced the project’s time­line, giv­en the de­clin­ing gas re­serves, not­ing that be­tween 2017 and 2018, tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial ne­go­ti­a­tions took place be­tween Shell, PDVSA, and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC), with then-min­is­ter Stu­art Young among the key par­tic­i­pants.

He said the process was dis­rupt­ed in 2019 when US sanc­tions ef­fec­tive­ly shut down the Drag­on project. Row­ley re­called that de­spite the sanc­tions, his gov­ern­ment main­tained diplo­mat­ic di­a­logue with Cara­cas. By 2020, he said, dis­cus­sions had reached a sen­si­tive stage when Venezue­lan Vice Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­dríguez vis­it­ed T&T dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, a move that sparked con­tro­ver­sy.

Row­ley in­sist­ed that his gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts laid the foun­da­tion for the progress now be­ing seen with the Drag­on gas project and dis­missed Gov­ern­ment claims of waste or mis­man­age­ment.

He al­so con­tend­ed that a six-month li­cence can­not be su­pe­ri­or to a two-year li­cence, en­com­pass­ing sev­er­al ar­eas pre­vi­ous­ly grant­ed un­der his gov­ern­ment’s tenure.

The for­mer prime min­is­ter al­so urged the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion to ap­proach the next phase of the ne­go­ti­a­tions for the Drag­on gas project with hu­mil­i­ty amid es­ca­lat­ing ten­sions. He cau­tioned that the gains made so far were the re­sult of per­sis­tent lob­by­ing and strate­gic en­gage­ment with in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners.

“In in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions, coun­tries are some­times very far apart, but when they ex­am­ine their in­ter­ests, they eat hum­ble pie and we are well fed in en­sur­ing that their in­ter­ests take pri­or­i­ty over their egos,” he said.

“Coun­tries have to do that from time to time. If you mis­step, you have a du­ty to walk it back, and you now have to re­ly on your coun­ter­part ac­cept­ing you as a new con­vert. But to come and try to pre­tend that your arrange­ment that you set­tled with some­body else is a new im­prove­ment is just gaslight­ing a na­tion.”