Young: Is Kamla still persona non grata in Venezuela?

For­mer Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, a for­mer Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, is press­ing the gov­ern­ment on its sud­den an­nounce­ment of a diplo­mat­ic mis­sion to Venezuela, de­mand­ing an­swers on whether it recog­nis­es Del­cy Ro­dríguez and whether Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad‑Bisses­sar still treats her as per­sona non gra­ta.

“Do you recog­nise her as the cur­rent act­ing Pres­i­dent of the Bo­li­var­i­an Re­pub­lic of Venezuela?” Young asked at a PNM me­dia con­fer­ence to­day. “We still can’t get an an­swer to that.”

He not­ed the gov­ern­ment has spent years in­sult­ing Ro­dríguez and un­der­min­ing re­la­tions with Trinidad and To­ba­go’s clos­est neigh­bour.

Young de­scribed the move as abrupt, ac­cus­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion of re­vers­ing its stance overnight.

“All of a sud­den, Madam per­sona non gra­ta wakes up and de­cides, ‘Oh, we need to get to Venezuela’, be­cause we have been see­ing for months now… you are de­stroy­ing Trinidad,” he said.

He said pre­vi­ous ne­go­ti­a­tions on cross‑bor­der gas projects had been ham­pered by “con­stant at­tack… and sab­o­tage” from the gov­ern­ment, in­clud­ing work se­cur­ing 30‑year li­cences for Drag­on and 20‑year li­cences for Co­quina, along with uni­ti­sa­tion agree­ments for Man­a­tee.

“Those are the projects that you are now count­ing on — every sin­gle gas project com­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly is what we did in the last 10 years,” he said.

Young al­so raised con­cerns about po­ten­tial cor­rup­tion in pipeline con­tracts and the award­ing of work‑over con­tracts to “favoured friends”, warn­ing that the gov­ern­ment’s mis­man­age­ment threat­ens Trinidad and To­ba­go’s en­er­gy sec­tor, which he called “the lifeblood of Trinidad”.