Petrotrin consultants paid over US$11m

MORE than US$11 million (or over TT$74 million) has been paid to two global consultancy companies for work done on behalf of the now defunct Petrotrin.

This was reported by Energy Minister Franklin Khan in the Senate on Tuesday. He was responding to a question from Opposition Senator Wade Mark on the total cost of each of the consultancy reports tendered to government by Solomon and Associates and McKinsey.

Khan said McKinsey did not produce any report per se, but was engaged as "industry experts" to help the Petrotrin board understand and design solutions to the, "continuously deteriorating operations of Petrotrin." In the end, the solution government chose was to shut the company down and retrench over 5,000 employees.

He added that work by McKinsey was done in incremental work streams and involved the consultants working as a team with experienced Petrotrin employees. Khan said that at any one time McKinsey had eight to ten experts working along with Petrotrin staff for approximately a year.

"The global cost was US$9.9 million paid as at October 28, 2018," Khan said. Petrotrin, cash-strapped for years, was shut down on November 30.

He reported the work modules were: initial engagement, review of upstream operations, review of downstream operations and organisational design and transition phase with the latter module still a work in progress.

Khan said the cost of consultancy by Solomon and Associates was US$1,279,000 and included a Petrotrin workforce optimisation study and exploration and benchmarking exercise.