In the face of rev­e­la­tions of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es on failed projects, the Chair­man of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) Con­rad Enill has de­nied that the com­pa­ny was reck­less in its in­vest­ment in At­lantic LNG Train 1 and its $200 mil­lion in­vest­ment in the Beach­field project which it lat­er re­alised was not nec­es­sary.

In a full page ad­ver­tise­ment in to­day’s Sun­day Guardian, Enill in­sist­ed that even though the com­pa­ny lost close to a half a bil­lion dol­lars on two failed projects in the last three years it was done af­ter care­ful analy­sis.

“Each of those de­ci­sions was ap­proached with the same rigour, with the same analy­sis of risk and re­turn, and in com­pli­ance with es­tab­lished poli­cies and pro­ce­dures.”

Enill said over the years, the boards, pres­i­dents and lead­er­ship teams at NGC have been pre­sent­ed with op­por­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate val­ue for Trinidad and To­ba­go and made in­formed de­ci­sions based on avail­able da­ta and pro­jec­tions in a volatile and un­cer­tain en­vi­ron­ment, al­ways with a strate­gic lens on fu­ture im­pact.

Some of these in­vest­ments the NGC chair­man as­sert­ed would have had to be made, did not nec­es­sar­i­ly pro­duce ex­pect­ed out­comes due to chang­ing cir­cum­stances and this is the na­ture of risk, which any en­tre­pre­neur or prof­it-dri­ven com­pa­ny will ap­pre­ci­ate.

He in­sist­ed that cal­cu­lat­ed risks are nec­es­sary for growth, and every suc­cess that NGC has achieved has in­volved a mea­sure of risk.

“To sug­gest that de­ci­sions that did not bear out in­tend­ed re­sults were reck­less de­ci­sions is to de­lib­er­ate­ly ig­nore the un­cer­tain­ty that comes with mak­ing any in­vest­ment that ex­tends in­to the fu­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly in our com­mod­i­ty-linked busi­ness gov­erned by rapid­ly chang­ing ex­ter­nal mar­kets.”

Enill not­ed that over the past few weeks, the Trinidad and To­ba­go me­dia have re­port­ed on “mis­man­age­ment” of NGC but said while the NGC sup­ports pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion it was con­cerned about the fo­cus on the failed projects.

“It is un­for­tu­nate that the fo­cus should be on spe­cif­ic out­comes that did not de­liv­er ex­pect­ed re­turns, rather than high­light­ing the pos­i­tive in­vest­ments that have po­si­tioned NGC for growth and suc­cess in an evolv­ing en­er­gy land­scape. These in­clude sta­bil­i­ty of the sec­tor at a time of sig­nif­i­cant de­cline, re­duc­tion in li­a­bil­i­ties and ex­po­sure in the fu­ture, get­ting val­ue across the en­tire en­er­gy val­ue chain, and prepar­ing for a green fu­ture.”

The NGC Chair­man said while the com­pa­ny sup­ports the role the me­dia plays and re­spects its im­por­tance in re­port­ing on is­sues of na­tion­al in­ter­est, it holds an of­ten-un­met ex­pec­ta­tion that in ful­fill­ing that role, the me­dia would com­mit to bal­anced re­port­ing.

“Ar­ti­cles which present par­tial, un­con­tex­tu­alised de­tails rep­re­sent­ed as a com­plete analy­sis, can be mis­lead­ing and de­struc­tive,” the state­ment read.

Busi­ness Guardian and Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian broke the sto­ries that showed the NGC in­vest­ing and po­ten­tial­ly los­ing more than a quar­ter bil­lion dol­lars in a failed at­tempt to restart the At­lantic LNG Train 1 plant, re­ly­ing on nat­ur­al gas that was al­ready com­mit­ted to the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor and hav­ing no re­al prospect of get­ting the gas in the short-term that is nec­es­sary for the plant to restart.

The Busi­ness Guardian al­so re­vealed that the NGC threw away an­oth­er $200 mil­lion be­hind a low pres­sure gas project in Beach­field which was dis­cov­ered to be un­nec­es­sary and it was left hold­ing the bag in­clud­ing $100 mil­lion worth of com­pres­sors that it can­not now sell.

Enill said the NGC recog­nis­es that it must al­ways act in the na­tion­al in­ter­est for the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go and play a key role in the man­age­ment of the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas re­sources and as­so­ci­at­ed busi­ness pur­suits.

“We ap­pre­ci­ate the need for com­plete trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty and ad­here to strict gov­er­nance pro­to­cols. We main­tain a bal­anced ap­proach, which does not com­pro­mise our lever­age for the fu­ture or clos­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties to in­crease sta­bil­i­ty and growth.” Enill said in the state­ment.

He said the NGC re­in­forced its gov­er­nance frame­work over the past three years to align it with the high­est in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards.

The NGC chair­man not­ed that as a re­spon­si­ble state en­ter­prise the com­pa­ny com­mits to and has ad­hered to re­port­ing on its busi­ness to the pub­lic through ap­pro­pri­ate gov­er­nance chan­nels and not through the me­dia.

The NGC chair­man claimed that the me­dia’s use of con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion un­der­mines the com­pa­ny and coun­try.

“We en­cour­age the me­dia to be more re­spon­si­ble in their re­port­ing. Unau­tho­rised dis­clo­sure of sen­si­tive and con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion un­der­mines com­mer­cial part­ner­ships and can make our coun­try ap­pear less at­trac­tive as an in­vest­ment lo­ca­tion and im­pact the brand of the coun­try at a piv­otal time in our coun­try’s glob­al en­er­gy growth,” said Enill in the full page state­ment in the news­pa­per.

“NGC con­tin­ues to work res­olute­ly to build a sus­tain­able fu­ture for our in­dus­try and our coun­try, with the best in­ter­est of our peo­ple firm­ly in fo­cus. The dili­gent work and un­re­lent­ing com­mit­ment of the men and women of the NGC Group have un­der­pinned our re­silience, as they con­tin­ue to demon­strate their adapt­abil­i­ty to han­dle all chal­lenges put to them. We en­cour­age all to pro­mote pro­duc­tive dis­course which in­cludes all sides in the dis­cus­sion. The Board and Pres­i­dent of NGC af­firm: We are com­mit­ted lead­ers. We stand by our Com­pa­ny and our de­ci­sions, con­fi­dent that the net re­sult of our work is a stronger NGC, de­liv­er­ing ever greater val­ue,” the state­ment ends.