Going nowhere on refinery sale

THE saga of the fate of key Petrotrin assets continued on Monday when the Prime Minister effectively overruled his own evaluation committee, asking it to further review and clarify its position on a trade union-backed proposal, which the committee had rejected mere days earlier.

Dr Rowley’s reported resurrection of the committee’s mandate came in the wake of objections being raised by the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU). Its leader Ancel Roget publicly complained about the committee considering the union’s “final” proposal in too narrow a timeframe. The Prime Minister had set a deadline of October 31 for talks on the sale of the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery to be concluded. His invitation to the committee to further review the matter effectively extends his deadline to November 30. It remains to be seen whether time will change what has already been rejected by Energy Minister Franklin Khan and the technocrats on the committee. It is unclear what impact placing the matter before the full Cabinet might also have.

What is clear is that this issue needs to be resolved one way or the other. In this regard, we concur with the position taken by the Energy Chamber which this week placed emphasis on the productive use to which this property could be put. Whatever your views on the question of the privatisation of these strategic, billion-dollar assets, this matter, as complex as it is, has dragged on for too long. Dr Rowley has yet again shown a willingness to be accommodating to Mr Roget’s union, and Mr Roget has in the past shown a willingness to modulate his stances given hope of acquiring these assets for the sake of his membership. But the PM and his own committee do not seem to share the same relationship. What is to account for the confusing signals over the weekend?

More than a year has elapsed since Patriotic Energies and Technologies Co was announced as the preferred bidder. Since then, talks have purportedly been going on under a cloak of secrecy. That secrecy is itself unsatisfactory, given what is at stake. What is clear is the need to resolve this issue at a faster pace and without political considerations trumping economic factors. That much is underlined by the overall economic outlook which continues to be gloomy, particularly in the energy sector. The recent reporting of $316 loss by the National Gas Company (NGC) is a warning about the vulnerability of the economy.

Available information suggests Petrotrin’s successor entities posted a $1.4 billion profit and contributed $820 million in taxes, levies, rents, royalties and licenses in 2019. That profitability continued into the first 6 months of the financial year 2020, though the second half of the year may emerge as considerably less rosy. Green energy must be part of our planning for the future, but that does not mean we cannot have as many cards on the table. The State needs to resolve this matter once and for all. Until that occurs, the perception of a long and winding road going nowhere will persist.