Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young has an­nounced that for­mer Petrotrin work­ers will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­turn to work at the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery un­der its in­com­ing op­er­a­tor, Oan­do PLC. How­ev­er, the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) has dis­missed this as a last-minute elec­tion promise.

Ad­dress­ing a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) meet­ing at Har­ris Prom­e­nade, San Fer­nan­do, on Wednes­day night, Young, who is al­so the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, warned elec­tors against be­liev­ing Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her deputy David Lee, whom he ac­cused of op­pos­ing the re­fin­ery’s re­open­ing.

“So let me put you on no­tice tonight. If we want that re­fin­ery open—be­cause let me tell you, do you know what Oan­do told us? Do you know who the work­ers for the re­fin­ery are go­ing to be? They are not bring­ing in any for­eign work­ers. It is the same work­ers who ran the re­fin­ery be­cause we have ne­go­ti­at­ed for them to use the same work­ers,” Young said.

Re­spond­ing to Young’s state­ment yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, OW­TU chief ed­u­ca­tion and re­search of­fi­cer Ozzi War­wick com­pared the promis­es to those made in 2020.

“The pop­u­la­tion has to stay fo­cused and re­mem­ber that PNM stands for ‘Promis­es Nev­er Ma­te­ri­alise.’ The pop­u­la­tion is al­so not pre­pared to ac­cept any more Petrotrin lies from Stu­art Young,” War­wick said.

The OW­TU, which is part of the Coali­tion of In­ter­est with the UNC, is ex­pect­ed to hold a me­dia con­fer­ence to­day to re­spond fur­ther to Young’s state­ments.

Dur­ing his ad­dress, Young warned vot­ers not to let UNC “lies” de­rail an­oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ty for the con­stituen­cies sur­round­ing the re­fin­ery. He high­light­ed that Oan­do is Nige­ria’s largest crude oil pro­duc­er and has raised bil­lions of US dol­lars to sus­tain its op­er­a­tions.

Crit­i­cis­ing the UNC’s op­po­si­tion to Gov­ern­ment’s ne­go­ti­a­tions with Oan­do, Young re­called that for­mer Jin­dal Steel and Pow­er chair­man Naveen Jin­dal had al­so been in­ter­est­ed in ac­quir­ing the as­set. He ac­cused the UNC of sab­o­tag­ing Jin­dal’s in­volve­ment.

“Go and search it. He is the most suc­cess­ful steel pro­duc­er in the world. What did Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and them do? Did they act in your in­ter­est? If Jin­dal had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­open the re­fin­ery, what did they do? They at­tacked his rep­u­ta­tion. And they have the au­dac­i­ty, the gall to talk about cor­rup­tion.”

Young ques­tioned the cal­i­bre of in­di­vid­u­als the UNC was at­tract­ing, sug­gest­ing that some had “ques­tions to an­swer.”

“Is that who we want to put in gov­ern­ment? So they ran Mr Jin­dal. His moth­er is the fourth rich­est woman in the world. He is now the most suc­cess­ful steel mak­er in the world, and they ran them. The UNC ran them.”

Young main­tained that Gov­ern­ment had been forced to make the dif­fi­cult de­ci­sion to re­struc­ture Petrotrin in 2018, which led to mas­sive job loss­es but al­so saw $2.7 bil­lion paid out to work­ers.

“The re­fin­ery pro­duces 150,000 bar­rels of oil in­to prod­uct. By then, they were on­ly pro­duc­ing, in Trinidad, 59,000 to 60,000 bar­rels of oil. So you had to buy oil from out­side. Un­less you have a sup­ply of oil, the maths not math­s­ing.”

He ar­gued that the re­struc­tur­ing had been suc­cess­ful, point­ing to the prof­itabil­i­ty of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Co Ltd and the sta­bil­i­ty of Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Co Ltd in en­sur­ing the coun­try’s fu­el sup­ply.

Young al­so re­it­er­at­ed that Gov­ern­ment had at­tempt­ed to let OW­TU’s Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies Co Ltd take over the re­fin­ery, even of­fer­ing it ex­clu­siv­i­ty in ac­quir­ing the as­set. How­ev­er, he as­sert­ed that this was not vi­able.

“We can­not take tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey and put it back in­to a loss-mak­ing ven­ture. In 2018–2019, Petrotrin lost $16 bil­lion. How could you re­open that with pub­lic funds? We gave them an op­por­tu­ni­ty. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it did not work. They want­ed the gov­ern­ment to pro­vide fund­ing and back bonds they could sell, but that would put us in the same kha­ki pants.”