KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Op­po­si­tion plans to launch a full in­quiry in­to Ni­Quan En­er­gy Trinidad, af­ter the com­pa­ny’s gas-to-liq­uids (GTL) plant in Pointe-a-Pierre went of­fline.

On Au­gust 14, the Gov­ern­ment, through its whol­ly owned, spe­cial pur­pose com­pa­ny, Trinidad and To­ba­go Up­stream Down­stream En­er­gy Op­er­a­tions Com­pa­ny Ltd (TTUDEO­CL), ter­mi­nat­ed its nat­ur­al gas con­tract with Ni­Quan En­er­gy over monies owed. How­ev­er, Ni­Quan dis­putes that it owes TTUDEO­CL what it claims.

The Ni­Quan plant, which is lo­cat­ed on the com­pound of the moth­balled Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery, has no ac­cess to any oth­er nat­ur­al gas and its fu­ture is now in lim­bo.

Dur­ing a UNC me­dia con­fer­ence at the Of­fice of the Leader of the Op­po­si­tion in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark said the Gov­ern­ment needs to come clean about the sweet­heart deals it made with the com­pa­ny.

He al­so called on Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert to pro­vide ev­i­dence that Ni­Quan En­er­gy did, in fact, pay US$10 mil­lion to ac­quire the plant in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia fol­low­ing the me­dia con­fer­ence, Mark said, “The UNC in­tends to con­duct an in­de­pen­dent foren­sic in­quiry in­to the op­er­a­tions of Ni­Quan to de­ter­mine, among oth­er things, the cost/ben­e­fit analy­sis that led the Gov­ern­ment to not on­ly in­vest in shares in that com­pa­ny, but to grant them a slew of sweet­heart arrange­ments, in­cen­tives and con­ces­sions."

He added, “There are so many unan­swered ques­tions sur­round­ing how these peo­ple came here and how they were able to get all these lu­cra­tive con­ces­sions. No cost/ben­e­fit analy­sis has been done to de­ter­mine if we, the tax­pay­ers, are giv­ing up all these ben­e­fits to this com­pa­ny. What is the net gain for the coun­try? How many peo­ple are they em­ploy­ing? What kind of eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty are they gen­er­at­ing? Are they pay­ing tax­es? What kind of tax­es are they pay­ing? There is no prop­er sub­mis­sion for your con­sump­tion to de­ter­mine the net ben­e­fit that would ac­crue to the coun­try as a whole.”

Mark al­so al­leged that Ni­Quan re­ceived gas, elec­tric­i­ty and wa­ter at re­duced rates.