Reveal TT’s natural gas supply

At a news conference at the J. Hamilton Maurice Committee Room of the Parliament, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain, the committee said in its report “the rationale here is that the continued ‘secrecy’ about the true state of gas availability leads to significant speculation and misinformation being publicly discussed when a simple, regularly updated public data release by the company would remove all of the existing speculation in the marketplace.” It added that beginning in March 2017 the NGC should hold quarterly meetings with the key players in the energy sector including all of the business chambers to receive and provide information about its operations.

The recommendations were made by committee chairman, David Small who was flanked by committee member, Allyson Baksh and Dr.

Lester Henry, the Vice Chairman of the committee and were based on a public hearing on May 9, 2016 and written submissions to the committee on April 14th. Small also criticised the NGC for paying dividends out of its retained earnings in 2014 and 2015 which he said were “multiples” of the company’s stated profit.

“So you had a company making profit and then paying significant multiples of that profit in dividends out of its retained earnings. That is a financially imprudent practice.” However, he said he understood that the company was owned by the state and the Minister of Finance “had total call on all the assets of the company because it is owned by the State.” The recommendations on the NGC was contained in one of three reports released at yesterday’s news conference.

The committee also released recommendations on the Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago (Petrotrin) and the operations of the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (Udecott).

Small said liquidity was a major and immediate challenge for Petrotrin and urged the company to continue to look for ways of deferring the payment of some of its bond commitments to give it some breathing room to stabilise its revenues.

Asked about the company’s ability to afford the interim five percent settlement reached with the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) on Monday, Small said the committee had not had a chance to discuss this because these were recent events.