An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

State-owned Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (Paria) yes­ter­day clar­i­fied that no third par­ty is in­volved in the con­trac­tu­al arrange­ment be­tween Paria and Petro­jam.

This state­ment comes af­ter en­er­gy ex­pert An­tho­ny Paul spoke about the op­er­a­tions and con­trac­tu­al arrange­ments of Paria and Petro­jam dur­ing a me­dia in­ter­view on Tues­day

Paria said the in­ter­view con­tained mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the agree­ment.

Gen­er­al man­ag­er of Petro­jam, Tel­roy Mor­gan, said, “Petro­jam’s plan for 2025 is to main­tain nom­i­nal pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 28,000 to 30,0000 bar­rels per day with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent of our crude through­put con­vert­ed in­to fu­el oil.”

He al­so em­pha­sised that “Petro­jam does not typ­i­cal­ly im­port fu­el oil and has not im­port­ed fu­el oil since May 2024.”

Paria out­lined that in its re­lease over the week­end, Paria sources ma­rine fu­el ex­clu­sive­ly and di­rect­ly from Petro­jam.  

This fu­el is sub­se­quent­ly bunkered and sold by Paria to in­ter­na­tion­al cus­tomers.

“We take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­it­er­ate the im­por­tance of this agree­ment with Petro­jam. It not on­ly se­cures a mar­ket for its fu­el oil but al­so presents Paria with the op­por­tu­ni­ty to sup­ply clean fu­el to the Ja­maican mar­ket.”

Paria added that it re­mains com­mit­ted to ex­plor­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties that en­sure con­tin­ued prof­itabil­i­ty for the com­pa­ny while con­tribut­ing to the broad­er eco­nom­ic in­ter­ests of T&T and the Caribbean re­gion.

Paul did em­pha­sise at the on­set of his Zoom con­ver­sa­tion on Tues­day with Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) leader David Ab­du­lah that there are in­deed mer­its for the col­lab­o­ra­tion and he gave ex­am­ples of those.  

“In both sce­nar­ios the pos­i­tive side and the po­ten­tial down­side I drew on the facts avail­able to me and prac­tice in the in­dus­try. I wel­come any ad­di­tion to the in­for­ma­tion in the pub­lic do­main. I know per­son­al­ly some of the in­di­vid­u­als lead­ing the trad­ing prac­tice at Paria and have con­fi­dence in their ca­pa­bil­i­ty and in­tegri­ty,” Paul added.

On Tues­day En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young dis­missed crit­i­cism of Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny’s US$50.2 mil­lion fu­el deal with Ja­maican re­fin­ery Petro­jam, call­ing it "mis­chief."