Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Stu­art Young has re­it­er­at­ed that the Gov­ern­ment can­not re­veal de­tails of its Drag­on Gas Field deal with Venezuela, as a breach of con­fi­den­tial­i­ty can end the ne­go­ti­at­ing process and crash a deal this coun­try sore­ly needs.

Calls for more trans­paren­cy over the deal were bel­lowed in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day by Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark, who said cit­i­zens de­serve to know what is go­ing on and what tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits the deal will bring.

How­ev­er, Young said the com­po­nent of con­fi­den­tial­i­ty, no mat­ter how peo­ple try to wa­ter it down, is a re­al­i­ty of these con­tracts.

“And in the en­er­gy sec­tor, this is what you trade in, lit­er­al­ly at times, a per­son’s cred­i­bil­i­ty and a per­son’s rep­u­ta­tion, mean­ing the coun­try’s rep­u­ta­tion and cred­i­bil­i­ty to up­hold sanc­ti­ty of con­tracts. To up­hold what takes place in a very com­pet­i­tive sec­tor, be­cause you see this isn’t like the gro­cery where it’s one gro­cery com­pet­ing with an­oth­er on a cor­ner. We are in this glob­al en­er­gy sec­tor where you have oth­er coun­tries com­pet­ing with Trinidad and To­ba­go to at­tract the re­sources of these multi­na­tion­als,” Young said.

He said the need to keep some of the deal­ings with Venezuela pri­vate has be­come in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant as the coun­try re-opens to the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty fol­low­ing an eas­ing of sanc­tions by the Unit­ed States.

“You come out of the ne­go­ti­a­tion room, for ex­am­ple at PDVSA, and you see glob­al en­er­gy play­ers. I won’t call their names here but glob­al multi­na­tion­al en­er­gy play­ers wait­ing to en­ter in­to the same room to ne­go­ti­ate deals and that is the rea­son why this is so crit­i­cal to be pro­tect­ed, the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty, be­cause the deal that we will get from Venezuela will dif­fer to the deal that a Eu­ro­pean com­pa­ny will get,” Young said.

He al­so point­ed out that T&T does not pos­sess the abil­i­ty to in­de­pen­dent­ly ex­plore and pro­duce off­shore gas and de­pend on multi­na­tion­al up­stream play­ers like Shell and BP.

“So, we must pro­tect very, very care­ful­ly the re­la­tion­ships we have with these com­pa­nies as they con­tin­ue to in­vest glob­al­ly. We are al­ways com­pet­ing glob­al­ly for their cap­i­tal to be in­vest­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go. And they pro­tect and they very jeal­ous­ly guard their brands and their brand pro­tec­tion,” Young added.