Young disputes PM’s claims on NGC profits

For­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young has ac­cused Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar of at­tempt­ing to take cred­it for the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny’s im­proved fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, in a state­ment is­sued a short while ago.

Young said the prof­it record­ed by the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go for the year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2025, re­sult­ed from de­ci­sions tak­en un­der the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion.

He said the re­struc­tur­ing of At­lantic LNG in De­cem­ber 2023 played a key role in boost­ing rev­enues, along with changes to gas pric­ing arrange­ments.

Ac­cord­ing to Young, the in­tro­duc­tion of a new bas­ket of in­dices us­ing Eu­ro­pean and Asian gas prices, as well as Brent pric­ing, con­tributed to high­er earn­ings. He added that the ac­qui­si­tion of a 10 per cent share­hold­ing in At­lantic LNG Trains 2 and 3 in­creased the num­ber of LNG car­goes avail­able to NGC, fur­ther sup­port­ing prof­itabil­i­ty.

Young re­ject­ed any sug­ges­tion that the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress ad­min­is­tra­tion was re­spon­si­ble for the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, de­scrib­ing such claims as mis­lead­ing.

He al­so point­ed to what he said were past loss­es linked to the Caribbean Gas Chem­i­cal Lim­it­ed project, which he said was ne­go­ti­at­ed be­tween 2010 and 2015 and con­tin­ues to neg­a­tive­ly im­pact NGC’s fi­nances.

Young crit­i­cised the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s man­age­ment of the en­er­gy sec­tor, nam­ing gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials in­clud­ing Roodal Mooni­lal, David Lee Ramdeen and Ram­per­sad Mooni­lal, and ac­cused them of fail­ing to make a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion.

He al­so called on NGC to dis­close how much of its prof­its were di­rect­ly at­trib­ut­able to high­er gas prices and in­creased LNG car­goes linked to the At­lantic LNG re­struc­tur­ing.