Trinidad and Tobago: Persad-Bissessar, Stuart Young clash over Petrotrin Refinery's true financial state

Trinidad and Tobago: Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar and the potential candidate for Prime Minister Stuart Young have engaged in a war of words over the Petrotrin refinery.  

Young, on Friday, accused the opposition leader of misleading the public by claiming that the refinery was profitable and noted that instead it was losing billions. On the other hand, Persad Bissessar has doubled down on her comments and said that Young was not telling the truth and is attempting to deceive the locals.  

Following news on Thursday about Cabinet approving Oando PLC as the preferred bidder for the lease of the refinery, the Opposition Leader criticised the decision and said that if returned to office in the upcoming general election, her government will not be honouring the deal.  

She also cited a newspaper article that said that the refinery recorded $1.67 billion in operating profits for 2018 and said that the government closed it to protect the outgoing Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley’s best friend and scuttle criminal investigations.  

Taking to Facebook, Young emphasised that Persad-Bissessar misled the locals with respect to the facts surrounding around the financial standing of Petrotrin in 2018 and also attached the relevant pages of the Consolidated Financial Statements for Petrotrin for 2018, which showed a $16.487 billion loss for the year 2018.  

He said that it is concerning that a former Prime Minister who is once again aspiring to lead Trinidad and Tobago would continually try to mislead the population and indicate to potential investors that she and her party would not be honouring legal agreements which may be entered into for the benefit of the locals. He called the behaviour of the UNC leader as most unfortunate and unbecoming. 

The Minister also shared one page from the Petroleum Company which dated back to September 30, 2018, and these consolidated financial statements. The document highlighted the loss for the year 2018 which amounted to $16.4 billion and $2.1 billion in 2017. 

Meanwhile the Opposition Leader is maintaining that Young is not telling the truth and she challenged him to release the entire report in the refinery and not just a single page. She further claimed that Young is trying to trick the public into thinking that refinery’s loss was $16.4 billion in 2018 when actually made a profit of $1.6 billion. 

Persad-Bissessar also provided evidence regarding impairment of property, plant, equipment, intangible assets, and goodwill at a cost of $15.4 billion. The evident was gathered from the financial report that Young reported. 

Parsad-Bissessar questioned Young, asking why he didn't release the entire document and not snapshots of only two pages. He further called it a dishonest and disreputable behaviour. 

She said that the reason behind this was the fact that impairment costs or depreciation of the closure in it is higher and that they turned last year’s profit into a last-year loss by adding the impairment.