Roget: I did not know about shutdown

PRESIDENT general of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) Ancel Roget has categorically denied claims by Energy Minister Franklin Khan that the Prime Minister told Roget a week ago, a decision had been taken to shut down the refinery and send workers home, when they met on August 21.

Responding hours later to the statement Khan made on Thursday morning in a television interview, Roget, at a Paramount Building news conference, said this was an attempt to distract attention from the backlash over the Petrotrin proposal.

“There are some people, faced with the consequences now trying to change the conversation and to redirect the narrative into some sort of foolishness. They are trying to get themselves out of it.”

He said on August 21, when he and six members of the union executive met Dr Rowley on Rowley’s invitation, he reported immediately after to his members that the meeting offered no details.

“The Prime Minister said that the country don’t need a refinery, that the refinery was the problem. That the loan was taken out, the US$850 million bullet payment we have to pay by August next year will downgrade the rating of both Petrotrin and the country. That we should be moving now to gas fuels, we don’t need liquid fuels again. And he pointed to some countries in the region that have already moved to gas instead of liquid fuels."

He said questions asked were met with the response that a meeting with the board would be arranged at which the board would answer all questions and give details.

The Prime Minister, he reiterated, "did not say they were shutting down the refinery. All of us were present. He said the country don’t need a refinery.

"How we interpret that is to mean that we need a refinery, we still verily believe the country must have, operate and own a refinery and therefore we interpret what he said to mean that it would be placed in the hands of some private interest. That was what was reported to the employees.”

“It would have made more political sense, more political value for me, if he had said that to come and tell the workers immediately that he was shutting down the refinery, there would be no refinery again.”

Saying "this fella Franklin Khan" was only concerned with "lease operators and farm-out operators and the give-away of the country’s asset," he traced a pattern of what he said were questionable statements made by Khan, about the salaries of Petrotrin workers representing 50 per cent of the operating cost when a KPMG report had indicated it was 11 per cent.