Warwick questions Petrotrin’s source of information

OILFIELD Workers Trade Union (OWTU) chief education and research officer Ozzi Warwick has questioned advertisements placed by Petrotrin in the three daily newspapers over the weekend in which the company said salaries and wages “as at June 30, 2018 (on an annualised basis) accounted for 52.8 per cent of operating costs.”

Speaking on his weekly radio programme, Warwick instead quoted from the company’s audited financial accounts prepared by KPMG which said the wage bill for 2017 was 11 per cent of the company’s operating costs.

“Where is the source for your information? There is no source, so you just say this is a true and accurate representation, but you don’t say who your source is.

“My source is the KPMG audited financial accounts.”

On Sunday, the state-owned oil company placed full-page advertisements titled “The facts – the following is a true and accurate representation of the current financial situation at state-owned Petrotrin.”

Petrotrin said the wage bill for its 3,437 permanent employees was a total of $1,871 million, or approximately $45,000 per month for each employee. But Warwick disputed Petrotrin’s facts, saying the 2017 wage bill is “11 per cent of the operating costs, because it is $2.3 billion out of $20.8 billion.

“We also have unaudited financial statements for the first quarter of this year ending 31 March, where you have operating costs standing at 11.4 billion and wage bill at $1 billion, which means it is 9.54 per cent of the operating costs.

”So Petrotrin can’t just put this information out, they need to state categorically where they get this information.”

He said the company had to show how it arrived at a figure of $45,000 per employee per month and noted that Petrotrin had “lumped” everything and everyone together to get that “erroneous figure.”

“So they included allowances, overtime, medical, housing, savings – things that don’t come to the worker. And they lump everybody – managers, vice presidents, everything.

“But when we asked to disaggregate the wage bill of those who fall within the bargaining unit of the union, they can’t tell us yet.

“So did you see any disaggregate from the managers to the ordinary worker? The country should also know what the managers are getting – you have 140 upper-level management, and they fall under the private payroll.”

He said certain politicians were attempting to portray Petrotrin as a “ward of the State,” but noted that the company maintained its own operations without any injection of state capital.

He said the company’s debt was due to bad managerial decisions such as the failed WGTL complex.