Young defends handling of Niquan report

For­mer Prime Min­is­ter and for­mer En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Min­is­ter, Stu­art Young, has re­spond­ed to com­ments made by his suc­ces­sor, Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, re­gard­ing a High Court rul­ing in­volv­ing the Min­istry of En­er­gy.

In a state­ment on his Face­book page, Young crit­i­cised Mooni­lal’s re­ac­tion to the court’s de­ci­sion that the Min­istry must re­lease an in­ves­tiga­tive re­port in­to a fa­tal ac­ci­dent at the Ni­quan gas-to-liq­uids plant.

Young de­scribed Mooni­lal’s com­men­tary as “mis­placed” and iron­ic, sug­gest­ing that the new Min­is­ter had fi­nal­ly found his com­fort zone—re­spond­ing to a mat­ter be­fore the court.

“One could not help but smile at the irony of Mooni­lal on­ly be­ing com­fort­able to com­ment when it comes to a mat­ter in court—a place with which he is per­son­al­ly well fa­mil­iar,” Young wrote.

He not­ed that dur­ing his tenure, the Min­istry of En­er­gy had act­ed on the ad­vice of state at­tor­neys and Se­nior Coun­sel in re­fus­ing the re­lease of the re­port. Ac­cord­ing to Young, Ni­quan, the com­pa­ny di­rect­ly af­fect­ed by the re­port, had de­clined to give con­sent for its pub­li­ca­tion, which raised le­gal con­cerns over po­ten­tial li­a­bil­i­ty for the Min­istry and its staff.

“If the High Court has now or­dered that the re­port be pro­vid­ed, then that is a mat­ter for the Min­istry of En­er­gy to con­sid­er and car­ry out,” Young added.

He de­fend­ed the Min­istry’s pri­or han­dling of the mat­ter, de­scrib­ing it as “prop­er­ly man­aged” by ex­pe­ri­enced le­gal pro­fes­sion­als, and dis­missed Mooni­lal’s re­marks as an un­found­ed at­tempt to dis­cred­it those ef­forts.