International Financial Center. Cool name. But it is not cool to practice, at the highest level of this Center, Level 26, the rooms housing the Ministry of Energy, financial imprudence, malfeasance and misdirection of the lowest order. It is not cool to embark on highly capital intensive, energy intensive without conducting due diligence studies; it is not cool to do high consumption health and ecological projects without a cost benefit analysis. Nor is it cool to fail, for every single year for four years, to provide an audited statement of accounts for this project, as is required by laws established by the Investments Division of the Ministry of Finance.

And it is definitely uncool to misdirect the public and the media telling them that a speech by Dr Lenny Saith, a compilation of articles by Professor Clement Sankat, and a listing of ideas by Professor Ken Julien and Mr Philip Julien, constitute either a cost benefit analysis, or an account sheet. These things are not cool to do because, finance, like water, or carbon, travel. Just as high carbon emissions in smelter and steel (1,900,000 tons per year) impact on poverty in Haiti, or sea level rise in Bangladesh, a credit crunch in Wall street, a center of finance, could trigger a global recession. The real reason for this credit crunch, as articulated by Washington, and by economists such as Professor Joseph Stiglitz, was false accounting: financial imprudence, malfeasance and misdirection by financial leaders.

The top floor of the International Financial Center must really do the cool thing: tell the truth. Tell the truth using the method which has been devised by financial theorists and managers to determine the feasibility of projects: the figures and facts of a cost benefit analysis. Tell the cool truth by employing the method used by theorists of accounting to provide control and substantiation: the figures on an accounting sheet.

What have been the costs factored in for smelter: the loss of three dams; 1000 acres of forest, beekeeping industries, farms and orchards; the loss of oil wells and well capping; infrastructural costs; the costs of loans for smelter, power plant and port; relocation loans for at least three communities; the cost of gas subsidies to the power plant for the supply of electricity to smelter; the costs of salaries to Alutrint for four and a half years; legal costs (high court, appeal court, English QC); the costs of rod mill, cable and wire plants; the costs of technical services, engineering, soil testing and consultancies; Environmental Impact Assessments costs; administrative costs borne by the EMA, the NGC, the NEC, the Ministry of Energy?

And propaganda costs for public relations events, “consultations”, newsletters, media ads and programs, bussing in supporters, jerseys, sponsorship of football, fetes and food; the cost of raw materials, all of which, save scarce gas and water, will be imported; the cost of producing a ton of aluminium compared to costs in China, Venezuela etc; the foreign or local disposal of the dangerous spent pot lining; the costs of transportation, marketing, the transformation of aluminium ingots, particularly in view of the fact that Alutrint has lost its 40% partner SURAL; the health and carbon costs?

What method has been used to evaluate health and carbon costs? What measure has been used to evaluate costs acknowledged by all Alutrint’s consultants: the smelter will impact negatively on baseline levels for human health, soil, water, air and vegetation. And carbon costs? What is Alutrint going to pay for its millions of tons of carbon emissions? 80 US$ per ton, 100$, 150 US$?

Could Alutrint, the Ministry of Energy, the National Energy Corporation, Professor Ken Julien and Dr Lenny Saith refute the irrefutable evidence that smelter, if properly accounted for, would not gain a single copper cent for the peoples, communities or government of Trinidad and Tobago? Could it refute the clear evidence afforded by our most senior economists that smelter is the wrong economic fit for Trinidad and Tobago?

The top floor of International Finance Center must understand its fiduciary responsibilities: it must account not just to the people of La Brea, but to the people of Trinidad and Tobago and the international community. It’s just not cool to attempt to hide and prevaricate on financial and carbon accounting anymore. Hiding the first could crash the global economy, prevaricating on the second would crash the human species.

Wayne Kublalsingh

University of the West Indies

St Augustine

The Right Honourable Prime Minister                                26th November, 2009

Of The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago,

Mr. Patrick Manning.

Dear Sir,

We have come here today to deliver this letter to you personally, to ask you to please kindly facilitate us with a speedy relocation process at least before the coming dry season in which we suffer.

We write on behalf of most of the residents of Square Deal Corner, Vessigny Village La-Brea, to seek your intervention in a matter of great discomfort to our families and our community with respect to the “buffer zone” at the Union Industrial Estate. Of the total number of residents to be relocated from the buffer zone, there are seven households in Sobo, and the majority resides at Square Deal, most of whom we represent.

The dry season is coming very soon, and each year we have suffered dust storms which run over the grass-less bulldozed surface of the Union Industrial Estate and stifle us daily. Many of our children are coughing all of the time. At most times our homes are dusty, with frequent equipment failure. Our lives are very uncomfortable.

Sir, our humble community of close neighbors’, our fruit trees and vegetable gardens and our homes are where we live, and have grown to love, and it is sad that we have been so completely neglected, and left to live downwind in daily dust storms year after year. Sir, there have been a rise of illnesses especially with children and the elderly such as rashes, emotional trauma and sleeplessness, respiratory illnesses all due to the excessive and unbearable dust, light and noise

Please help us by putting our relocation issue on the front burner with due consideration for the stress which we have endured. Mr Prime Minister we are approaching six years since the forested hills and clean rivers behind our homes were bulldozed. There are many families who complain daily about respiratory problems, and all we ask of you Sir is that you consider our discomfort and the insecure condition in which we have been left to live, without the clearance to improve our lives and residences while we await this fated relocation.

Why are we forgotten? Why is there this delay? There are many precedents of how the relocation issue can be handled. The community in the buffer zone in Point Ligoure and Beach Road Point Fortin are an example of how the relocation exercise could be conducted. Why are we being treated worse than them? Should we not at least expect to be treated equally?

Please be friendly to us and understand that we are in need of your kind favour. We ask that you please facilitate an urgent meeting between our lawyers so that we can be relieved of another year of living in the coming dry season dust clouds.

We respectfully await your urgent response, and remain

Forever yours in fair treatment,

………………………………………….

Leon and Abigail Modeste.

13 Square Deal Corner,

Vessigny Village,

La Brea.

Courtesy Trinidad Express 21st November 2009

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article?id=161560487

We will go to Alutrint, says environmentalist

Saturday, November 21st 2009

ENERGY MINISTER Conrad Enill has sent several Alutrint reports to environmentalist Dr Wayne Kublalsingh, but the activist says they are all irrelevant.

His comment came a day after he and three other anti-smelter activists staged a sit-in demonstration at the Ministry of Energy.

A statement from the Ministry of Energy yesterday stated that the minister ’delivered documents providing information on the development of the aluminium industry in Trinidad and Tobago in response to a request for information on the Alutrint aluminium smelting project’ from Kublalsingh.

But in a telephone interview yesterday, Kublalsingh said the Freedom of Information Act statements for the year 2008-2009, a transcript from the proceedings at the South Trinidad Chamber of Industry and Commerce Smelter Symposium of 2006, a copy of former energy minister Lenny Saith’s speech at that event and a copy of the book Aluminum Smelting, Health Environment and Engineering Perspectives edited by Mukesh Khare, were completely useless and far from what they asked for during the silent protest at the International Financial Tower in Port of Spain.

’We asked for the cost benefit analysis of the smelter plant, not that. We have all of that information already and it seems as if the minister is just making a mockery now,’ Kublalsingh insisted.

He said he tried going through all the appropriate legal channels, including the Environmental Management Company, the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministries of Energy and Housing, in order to get ’any accounting information regarding the viability of the Alutrint smelter plant’ being constructed in La Brea.

However, he said everyone has failed to give them any answers pertaining to the matter. Kublalsingh said they will now try to get the information directly from Alutrint.

Courtesy Trinidad Express Friday 20th November 2009

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article?id=161560036

ENVIRONMENTAL activists are again calling on Government to produce the cost benefit analysis used to suggest that the Alutrint aluminium smelter plant would be beneficial for this country.

The call, which was made by environmental engineer, Cathal Healy-Singh and UWI lecturers Wayne Kublalsingh and Peter Vine, comes seven days before this country hosts the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to discuss climate change and the environment.

At 11 a.m. yesterday, the trio, along with three other residents from the Square Deal area in La Brea yesterday walked into the International Financial Centre Tower in Port of Spain and silently sat down to protest Government’s refusal to make this information public.

According to Kublalsingh, after waiting a-year-and-a-half to see on what the Government based their decision to build the aluminum smelter plant in La Brea, enough was enough.

’We just want to see what the State has spent on Alutrint, what it will spend, and what it will gain. This much I think the citizens of this country have right to know,’ he said.

In addition to that, Kublalsingh insisted that Alutrint was breaking the law because over the past four years, they have neglected to publish their accounts.

After being confronted by 20 officers of the Guard and Emergency Branch, Tower security and other senior police officers asking the group to leave, at 12.30 p.m., an official from the Ministry of Energy finally came down and said the Minister, Conrad Enill, would meet them.

However, Enill, who arrived just after 1 p.m., told members of the media, before he met with the group, that it did not matter if the group had been waiting four years to see accounting records or a year to see the analysis report.

In fact, he said ’so what if they are waiting…if they requested for this information appropriately, the Government will respond, if they should’.

And during his meeting with the group, which lasted approximately an-hour-and-a-half according to Healy-Singh, the Minister seemed neither here nor there on the matter because he said ’he did not have either one of these things’.

The Energy Ministry in a statement following the meeting said ’it was agreed that the group would submit their concerns to the Minister in writing and a further meeting will be held’ to address the concerns of the people living in those buffer zones.

However, Kublalsingh, Vine and Healy-Singh did not agree with that and insisted that they would continue to lobby until the Government produces the records.

PRESS CONFERENCE

 Please attend a press conference outside the doorway of Tower C, Ministry of Energy, 1 Wrighton Road, Port of Spain on Thursday 19th November, at 11:00 am, hosted by the NO SMELTER groups in Trinidad and Tobago.

The object of the Press Conference is to attempt to elicit a response to our official letters to Minister Conrad Enill, Professor Ken Julien and Mr Philip Julien requesting the following information:

 1.A meeting to discuss the economic viability of Alutrint.

2.A detailed accounting of the costs of Alutrint, past, current and proposed.

3.The cost-benefit analysis of the Alutrint project.

Critical health and legal issues will also be discussed.

Sincerely

Wayne Kublalsingh 771-5181

Beena Baggan 332-0655

From the Trinidad Business Guardian.

On September 16, the local aluminium company Alutrint held a function at the Hyatt regency Hotel in Port-of-Spain to launch a brochure on the aluminium industry in T&T.After the formal part of the function, I spoke with Energy Minister Conrad Enill and Alutrint chief executive Phillip Julien.

Here’s an excerpt of both interviews:

AW: Among the issues that have been raised by those who are opposed to the smelter is the issue of the economic viability of the Alutrint smelter project. Is it viable?

CE: The Government took the decision that we would enter into the industry and therefore in the long term it would be viable on the same basis that the Point Lisas development project is viable.

Any industry that we are getting into for the first time would require us to put into that industry a development-type input. This would be the same. But if you look globally and in the long term, the smelter would be economic.

AW: Based at what price of product?

CE: The planners of the smelter project did a number of different scenarios and the model that is going forward, both in terms of power costs and in terms of how we propose to set up the marketing arrangements, takes that into account. The details of these are available but I don’t keep that in my head.

AW: What’s the price of natural gas that, it is proposed, will be converted into electricity to run the smelter?

CE: I think there are two issues. The first issue is that we put a price that meets the requirement but secondly, there is an escalation clause in the contract such that if the commercial price goes up, then the cost of natural gas to the project goes up as well. Therefore, there is not going to be the expectation of any subsidy on the natural gas.

AW: How soon do you expect the project to be profitable as opposed to viable?

CE: It will depend. Right now, you would recognise that we are going through a series of challenges as it relates to the implementation of the project. Clearly that is going to create some cost pressures that would have to be factored in. But, by and large as most government projects go, this should be profitable in five or six years.

AW: Do you think that the public information drive that Alutrint is going on would have the effect of convincing any of the anti-smelter people?

CE: No, I don’t think the intention is to convince the anti-smelter people. The intention is simply to provide the information that we have used in arriving at the decisions. And clearly the decision that we have arrived at is based on the soundest data that is available. We talked today about those who are opposed talking about the incident in China to create some kind of impression that the Alutrint smelter is unsafe. Whereas the truth is that the Chinese incident was simply not relevant to the issue because it was not an aluminium smelter. The real issue is that there are some people who believe that the natural gas-led industrialisation process is not one that they support. And therefore it does not matter what you do, they are going to have a point of view that is different to yours. Convincing the anti-smelter people is not the intention of today’s function. The intention really is to bring balance to the discussion and to provide the facts as we know them.

————————————–

The discussion with Phillip Julien was longer and more wider ranging than the discussion with Mr Enill.

AW: How has the search for a new equity partner been going?

PJ: It has been going very well, I have to leave it with the primary shareholder itself to make the formal statement on it. I am reasonably confident that you will be hearing something positive in the near future. Closure on the search should happen before the end of this year, God willing.

AW: Is it likely to be a Chinese company given the fact that they are the builders and the providers of the technology?

PJ: At this point, the People’s Republic of China are focusing their interest in making sure that the smelter construction component is built well as well as supporting it through the debt financing, which is quite substantial. In terms of their participation in the equity, that really is a question for the shareholder.

AW: Would the equity participant be a well known name?

PJ: In the industry, it is a well-known name. And without giving too much away, I would dare say that they would be known not only in the aluminium smelting industry but in the downstream use of aluminium. [Sources in Brazil’s aluminium sector confirmed that the proposed equity partner is the Votorantim group of Brazil, whose aluminium company, CBA, is Brazil’s largest aluminium producer. CBA’s reported share is 10 per cent.]

AW: One of the interesting things about Alutrint is that it may start its life without the kind of backward vertical integration that most smelters have—as in the ownership of an alumina source. What is the shareholder doing about that issue?

PJ: Alumina, which is our raw material, is always very competitively priced and it is linked to the LME (London Metal Exchange) price of aluminium. So while a completely vertically integrated producer may have some built-in advantages, it is entirely possible for a smelter, particularly with linkages to downstream, to be more than economically viable by buying alumina from various entities out there.

AW: One of the big issues for me is the issue of whether the smelter is going to be viable. And, even more to the point, whether it is going to be profitable. I would imagine that viability and profitability depend on the price of natural gas and alumina as well as the price that the final products can fetch. What can you say that would assure the reading public that Alutrint is going to be viable and eventually profitable?

PJ: Without going into details, I would like to answer that with some analogies.

We know of numerous smelters in China with similar equipment and technology to us, yet which have a much higher operating cost than us because their electricity is fuelled by coal and ours by natural gas. Yet those Chinese smelters are still able to be profitable at today’s depressed prices. There are smelters in the western world built at a much higher capital cost than Alutrint will be built. Alutrint is being built at a lower capital cost than most of the recent smelters in the western world because of the advantage of working with a Chinese design, technology and the very attractive debt financing.

So we have very attractive financing, an economically priced smelter and the country has natural gas—which is one of the more competitive raw materials for the operating cost of the smelter because power is about 30 to 35 per cent of your operating cost.

So just intuitively, from a layman’s perspective, and taking into account that the aluminium industry is cyclical, it allowed the Government to predict a conservative value when doing the overall economics of the smelter to ensure that we can ride out this cyclical storm and more importantly, play to our strength of a competitive price of power—without giving away the farm—which will place us in the lowest quartile in terms of operating cost.

AW: At today’s price of aluminium, would Alutrint be profitable?

PJ: I’m not at liberty to say what the LME price was based at. But over the course of the last four years that Alutrint has been in existence, I have never had a burning concern about whether the project would be, ultimately, viable and profitable.

AW: I would imagine that at last year’s historic peak prices, had the smelter been in operation, it would have been very profitable?

PJ: Maybe not last year. That’s something that I cogitate on regularly—if the delay in construction may ultimately redound to our benefit. The industry went through a terrible time recently and six months prior to that was the best time ever.

My take is that if we had come into production when we were slated to, we would have had a rough few months because we may have started at the peak of the cycle and would have had to ensure all the learning pains as that cycle started to come down.

That would have brought a great deal of undue stress and pressure on Alutrint, which, knock on wood, we would not have to face again in the future.

AW: So what you are saying is that the viability of the project does not depend on an astronomical price?

PJ: No never. Not at all. The beauty of the Alutrint project is the financing coming from China which allows us to have the robustness which ensures viability at a very management LME price.

AW: What is the financing from China?

PJ: It’s US$400 million in total—US$100 million in a concessionary loan and US$300 million in buyers’ credit which is more commercial. The concessionary loan is much lower than the buyer’s credit.

ALUTRINT AD: FREEDOM OF DISINFORMATION

Alutrint is an economic bust. It is the worst economic fit for Trinidad and Tobago. It is ruinous to the health, the ecology and economy of the Republic. Not a ton of newsprint, a thousand gallons of printer’s ink could paper over these facts. Alutrint’s latest propaganda, a double-page newspaper ad titled ‘Alutrint Limited: Freedom of Information Act Statement 2009 Update’, is an attempt to paper over the fact that it is hiding critical information from the public, the ultimate stakeholders of the company. It is simply unable to publish, as is required by law, its annual accounts, or to provide any cost-benefit analysis to prove its economic viability. The following facts illustrate how Alutrint is subverting, with a face of stone, the concept of freedom of information.

In April 2006, one year after Alutrint was incorporated, the head of the Joint Select Committee of Parliament, Senator Mary King called on officials of Alutrint, the Natural Gas Export Task Force, the Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries, the National Gas Company and the National Energy Corporation to appear before her to answer questions on Alutrint’s economic viability. Officials refused to appear. The Senator then demanded that senior officials from these state entities appear. Again they refused. The Senator then requested that the Speaker of the House order them to appear. The Speaker refused.

In April 2007, after Alutrint/National Energy Corporation applied to the Environmental Management Authority for a certificate of clearance to build a smelter, a letter was written to the Authority (Farmer, Vine, Kublalsingh) asking for any cost-benefit analysis that might have been conducted on Alutrint. The National Environmental Policy gives the EMA the option to require that an applicant who intends to embark on large gas intensive projects conduct a cost benefit analysis. The EMA refused to reply. A sit in, followed by the intervention of state police, and a forty-day fast ensued. Over forty citizens fasted, alternately, over the period. No cost-benefit analysis.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, letters were written to the National Energy Company and Alutrint, and copied to the Ministries of Finance and Energy. The letter sought to have these state entities provide an accounting, a cost-benefit analysis of Alutrint. The reply? This information was confidential.

In 2008, Peter Vine and Wayne Kublalsingh went into the National Energy compound to request information on the economics of Alutrint. The Chief Executive Officer of Alutrint, Mr Prakash Saith, ordered that security look the doors and throw out these citizens. Kublalsingh was arrested by state police.

In June 2009, citizens belonging to eight different groups held a press conference outside the Financial Towers in Port of Spain. They read a letter to the media calling on Alutrint to publish its accounts, as stipulated by state regulation: “Government has agreed that State Enterprises be required to publish in at least one major daily newspaper a summary of the audited financial statements within 4 months to the end of their financial year and a summary of the unaudited half-yearly statements within two months of the mid-year date.” The letter was sent to Mr Philip Julien Acting Chief Executive Officer of Alutrint, Mr Conrad Enill Minister of Energy and Professor Ken Julien. It also called on these three key architects of Alutrint to disclose any cost benefit analysis of smelter. To date, no reply.

In August 2009, citizens wrote to the head of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament requesting that the committee write to the Acting Auditor General to enquire into Alutrint’s non-publication of its annual accounting statement, as is required by law. The committee sent a letter to the Acting Auditor General. To date, no reply.

In September 2009, a symposium on the Economics of Alutrint was held at St Mary’s College. The panel included professionals in the field of economics and gas. Ms Mary King gave seven solid reasons why Alutrint is uneconomic. The following resolution was passed:

“Be it resolved that the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago release immediately to the people of TT the rationale for the Aluminum Smelter, including detailed costs of natural gas and other inputs and expected revenues over the next 20 years and, in the event that this information is not forthcoming, that the GORTT suspend with immediate effect the Aluminum Smelter project.”

This resolution was published in both the print and visual media. To date, no response.

Alutrint’s Freedom of Information ad is meant to convey an image of officialdom dutifully bent on abeyance to law and transparency. This is a false image. Alutrint has steadfastly refused to provide accurate information to the public on the viability of smelter. It has, in its four and a half year history never published, contrary to law, a statement of its accounts. It says in its ad that Sural Venezuela is the 40% joint partner of Alutrint. False. Sural Venezuela has pulled out and the architects of smelter are hounding the globe trying to find a joint partner. Its ad, like all of its other propaganda projects, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, is meant to paper over the fact that it is subverting the free exchange of information. It is meant to hide the fact that Alutrint cannot provide its stakeholders with information to prove its economic viability.

Wayne Kublalsingh

University of the West Indies

Submitted by Dr Peter Vine

From The Times (UK)

October 1, 2009

Beijing moves to halt growth as supply starts to outstrip demand

Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent

 The Government of China has launched an attack on overcapacity in its heavy industries with a series of stinging curbs on new factories, smelting plants and port-building projects.

The government crackdown, unleashed a day before the country enters a ten-day holiday to celebrate the communist revolution, comes amid rising fears that China’s economy may be blundering into a destructive boom-bust cycle.

In a stark admission yesterday that the recent state-backed investment binge may be swelling out of control, Beijing warned that banks and jobs were being jeopardised by “chaotic over-expansion” in a range of sectors.

Despite the apparent buoyancy of the economy, and its lightning scramble out of the global financial crisis, deep sensitivities remain. For political reasons, Beijing is eager to keep GDP growth above the level of 8 per cent supposedly required to maintain social stability and job creation. But there are fears that huge imbalances between production capacity and actual demand could lead to price wars, corporate failures and severe setbacks for the country’s stellar expansion trajectory.

The government statement included a direct swipe at provincial authorities and what it identified as slack controls on spending and deliberate flouting of planning guidelines. “Some regions act illegally, give approvals in violation of regulations or allow building before approval is granted,” said a message on the Chinese Cabinet’s website.

Under the terms of Wednesday’s onslaught against industry, the building of new steel plants and the expansion of existing facilities were slapped with indefinite bans. Similar restrictions were placed on any impending plans for cement, glass and coke factories. China will not allow any new aluminium smelting plants to be built before 2012, said the official statement, and no new docks are to be built anywhere in the country over the same period.

China’s State Council calculates that the impact of this year’s 140 billion yuan (£13 billion) investment spree in steel mills will be to lift overall national production capacity some 40 per cent above the country’s entire annual demand. The same dynamics reportedly apply to cement.

Heavy polluters took the full force of the government hammer-blow, but even industries with exposure to the so-called “green” economy were not spared. Producers of polysilicon, the raw material for making solar panels, and makers of wind turbines were also told their activities would be far more tightly regulated. “Backward” industries will be forced to raise their game and meet higher efficiency standards.

In the absence of such controls, said the statement from the Chinese Cabinet, “it will be hard to prevent vicious market competition and to increase economic benefits, and this could result in facility closures, layoffs and increases in banks’ bad assets.”

The draconian move follows more than six months of record-breaking bank lending and the disbursement of 4 trillion yuan in government stimulus money. Cumulative new bank lending in the first half of 2009 amounted to more than $1.1 trillion, and some argue that a substantial proportion of this found its way towards the property and stock markets and is fuelling a bubble that may also prove unsustainable. The astronomical levels of corporate investment, warn senior economists, place the booming Chinese economy at increased risk of a sudden collapse in growth.

At the very least, the unprecedented flood of liquidity is expected to create a bad loan crisis in large parts of corporate China, which may eventually force state-owned banks to write off billions.

Paul Sheard, chief global economist at Nomura, warned in a note to investors that the high contribution of investment to China’s GDP figures poses potentially serious challenges to growth. “By offsetting the export-led downturn by spurring domestic demand,” he explained, “China is doing its bit for the long-awaited ‘global rebalancing’ ”. He added that because the economy was investment-inten- sive to start with, engineering a surge in infrastructure, and hinterland-focused, spending is making it even more so. That raises the longer-term risk of growth being hit by an investment-led slump.

Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh

REPUBLIC DAY SPEECH

Many thanks to Professor Pantin for inviting me to speak. The movement to deconstruct aluminum smelting in Trinidad and Tobago is made up of groups from Cedros, Chatham, Cap-de-Ville, Otaheite, Claxton Bay, Curepe and Port of Spain. Many thanks to those of you in the audience who have spent decades of intellectual labour attempting to persuade our governments to abide by the laws of science, logic, and even law itself. For four years we in the anti-smelter movement have been attempting to get from the government information on the economics of Alutrint. Philip Julien, the son of Professor Ken Julien, the acting Chief Executive Officer of Alutrint, said quite clearly: “Alutrint is the best economic fit for Trinidad and Tobago.” There is nothing better in the world for Trinidad and Tobago than Alutrint. Well, we want to know if this is true or not. The best way of finding out this is to do a cost accounting of Alutrint. To study the cost-benefit analysis of Alutrint. To see where the state has outlined, here are the costs, the prospective costs. And here are the benefits, the prospective benefits. And so for four years citizens have been trying to obtain such an analysis from the state. It is the most effective tool we know for measuring economic viability. This is the story of our attempts.

First, there was the attempt of Parliament. Senator Mary King. As head of the Joint Select Committee of Parliament in April 2006, she called on officials of the National Gas Company, the National Energy Company, Alutrint itself, members of the National Gas Export Task Force, officials such as Dr Lenny Saith, Professor Ken Julien, Philip Julien to attend the committee hearing. She wanted to talk to them. What will it cost Alutrint to process a tonne of aluminum? Where are you going to market your product? What are the externalities of this project? Well, they refused to attend. She once more demanded they come. They refused. She called on the Speaker to demand that they appear. He refused. Here is Senator King writing a month later: “Nothing has come to the Parliament and little to the general public which defines and justifies the creation of an aluminum industry with respect to the feasibility and optimum use of our diminishing natural gas reserves, its impact on the environment, the levels of earnings from the sale of gas and a comparison with the longer uses to which this gas can be put in the context of Peak Oil.” (May, 2006. Express Newspaper).

Second, we went to the Environment Management Company. Rosanna Farmer, Peter Vine and Wayne Kublalsingh wrote the EMA a letter if they could furnish details of the economics of Alutrint, or any cost benefit analysis for the Alutrint project. The National Environment Policy gives the EMA an option. The Policy says, here EMA, you can request from an applicant for a Certificate of Environmental Clearance a cost benefit analysis, especially for capital intensive, gas intensive, projects. The EMA did not exercise this option. Nor did it answer our letter. We paid three visits to the EMA; the CEO refused to meet with us. A sit-in ensued. It lasted all day and eventually police were called out to throw Kublalsingh out of the building. A forty day fast in front of the EMA ensued. The citizens came, they fasted. They were calling for three specific things, concrete things. Among them, any information on any cost benefit analysis that the EMA knew of. No information.

Following the visit to the EMA, letters were written to the National Gas Company, the National Energy Corporation, the Minister of Energy under the Freedom of Information Act requesting a cost benefit analysis. The answer: confidential. On 2007 Peter Vine and Wayne Kublalsingh visited the office of the National Gas Company in Couva requesting a meeting with the CEO. The NEC locked their front door, locked their front gate. The CEO, Mr Prakash Saith, arrived and requested his security to throw out the visitors. When this proved unenforceable the police were called. Kublalsingh was arrested and taken away.

In June 2009, citizens of eight anti-smelter groups wrote to Professor Ken Julien, the Minister of Energy Conrad Enill, the acting CEO of Alutrint Philip Julien. The letter requested:

1. A meeting with you to discuss the economic viability of Alutrint.

2. A detailed accounting of the costs of Alutrint, past, current and proposed.

3. The cost-benefit analysis of the Alutrint project.

There has been no reply to this request.

In late June 2009 we then wrote to the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament requesting that the Committee write the Acting Auditor General asking for “a statement of the accounts of the state enterprise Alutrint”. We reminded them that the citizens are the ultimate shareholders of Alutrint. The Chairman did write the Acting Auditor General. No reply.

In September 2009, we hosted a symposium at St Mary’s College on the Economics of Alutrint. The symposium panel comprised noted professional economists. Here is the resolution of this symposium:

“WHEREAS:

We are in a position where our proven gas reserves are declining;

We do not have the higher order factors to develop the downstream industries related to the smelter;

We need to prioritise the use of incomes from energy to uses other than those, like the Aluminum Smelter project, whose viability is very much in doubt;

And having recognised,

The large carbon emission and the related health risk to our society, in particular to the 4080 residents who live in a radius of 2km from the proposed smelter and the cost of monitoring those most at risk;

The demise of a quality human existence in the neighbouring communities;

The environmental and ecological losses;

That there is no basic information on the actual returns to the country, financial or otherwise;

BE IT RESOLVED THAT:

The Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago release immediately to the people of TT the rationale for the Aluminum Smelter, including detailed costs of natural gas and other inputs and expected revenues over the next 20 years and, in the event that this information is not forthcoming, that the GORTT suspend with immediate effect the Aluminum Smelter project.”

So this is our brief history of begging. You beg and beg and beg and then what do you do? The stakeholders have to beg the state to see its own economic business. We have written to Minister of Finance, Corporation Sole. We have had to remind her and other state officials of The State Enterprises Performance Monitoring Manual, published by the Ministry of Finance, Investments. This Manual, the rules of which, according to the Ministry itself, must be enforced by the Corporation Sole, states: “Government has agreed that State Enterprises be required to publish in at least one major daily newspaper a summary of the audited financial statements within 4 months to the end of their financial year and a summary of the unaudited half-yearly statements within two months of the mid-year date.”

Well, why would the state officials not want to provide the accounts? Why are they hiding Alutrint’s accounts? Why do they refuse to sit down with the Parliament, the people, the professional economists to discuss costs and benefits?

Here is what some of our professionals, intellectuals of the highest order have said of Alutrint’s viablility:

DR LLOYD BEST, economist. “Best believes that the aluminum smelter is a major mistake and questions why government was committing resources to a capital intensive project which he said as fraught with risk and which ‘might be hit with a major recession in the global economy which could come while it is being constructed or shortly after its construction.’ Best was concerned the country was allowing its resources to be used in a smelter with little return to the country.” (June, 2004, Express Business, Curtis Williams article).

PROFESSOR JOHN SPENCE, University of the West Indies Professor, former Independent Senator. Professor wrote a three part analysis of the proposed smelting industry for Trinidad and Tobago. “We should say no to aluminum smelting in general but aluminum could be imported for down-stream industries … My conclusion is definitely, that we should not smelt bauxite or alumina in Trinidad. This is based on the social, health, environmental, economic and governance issues.” (April 2006, Express Newspaper).

PROFESSOR DENNIS PANTIN, University of the West Indies professor and Head of the Sustainable Economic Development Unit (SEDU) at UWI. Professor Pantin and a team of his colleagues advocate full disclosure on smelter project and a Sustainable Development Planning Framework, which would entail, in part, a Cost Benefit Analysis of each smelter. “A final decision on these projects [Alcoa and Alutrint] requires, at worst, comparison of alternative uses of the natural gas inputs, the land space in Chatham and La Brea relative to alternative uses of the gas, land space and other human and financial costs which the society would have to incur: all based on full disclosure to the ultimate shareholders: i.e. the citizens, residents and taxpayers of T&T.” (SEDU Discussion Brief No. 1, A Sustainable Development Planning Framework for Mega-Projects in Small Places, December, 2006).

PROFESSOR SELWYN RYAN. Former University of the West Indies professor in Politics. “One wonders whether Willians would now insist in building the smelter on the terms that are apparently being considered and which do not seem to be of much benefit to Trinidad and Tobago.” (July, 2006, Express Newspaper).

DR STEVE SMITH, Medical Consultant, President of The Medical Board of Trinidad and Tobago, “The potential environmental onslaught that will occur, in the wake of the construction of an aluminum smelter in the South West Peninsula of this country, constitutes the single most significant threat to gains achieved through advances in “public health” during my own lifetime. It is a threat which, if not taken seriously will certainly undo many of the gains that have been achieved in health since the Moyne Commission of 1937, a threat which would be evermore acute in the light of a continuing and impotent curative health sector.” (Executive Summary, Report on SENES Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessment of Alutrint Aluminum Complex, June 2007).

PROFESSOR KENNETH RAMCHAND. Former professor at the University of the West Indies, Independent Senator. “We face in the South Western Peninsula the imminent laying law of agriculture and fishing, the dislocation of families and villages, and the visionless breaking up of communities and community spirit established over a long period of living together on the land and on the sea.” (Senate Motion, July 6th July 2005).

REG POTTER, International Gas Expert. “It will take discoveries of 1.5 trillion cubic feet per year to simply stand still and at present we have only 12 years of gas production rate left. The time is passed due for a total moratorium on all new gas-related projects before the country is totally ruined.” (Guardian Newspaper, July 2006)

At the recent symposium on the Economics of Alutrint, Ms Mary King gave reasons why smelter would be an economic bust. The lack of requisite high order factors, the impossibility of cluster formation in this industry, the disinterestedness of the private sector to develop such clusters, the high cost of externalities, our gas reserve position, the lack of vertical integration; smelter is following a failed ISCOTT model. We cannot afford not to stop smelter she declared. At the symposium, Professor Julian Kenny raised the question of the high carbon costs. Reg Potter raised the question of declining gas reserves.

So. From whom would we get accountability? Professor Ken Julien? Minister Enill? Alutrint’s Philip Julien? Dr Lenny Saith and his brother Prakash Saith? We are talking to rocks, stones, boulders. We cannot get if from them. We cannot get constitutional reform from them. No cost benefit analysis, no accounting, no constitution. So what do we do? What is to be done?

Well, Professor Dennis Pantin has been working, like a Roman Catholic nun, getting up a four in the morning, duty, time, cleaning, working hard hard hard on constitutional reform. And the problem is implementation. Could we rely on our governments, as presently constituted, to implement? History, over the last five hundred years of human history, has shown that new constitutions, significantly altered constitutions, are implemented, in almost one hundred percent of the cases, at the end of a long period of revolution, mass movement, social upheaval – at the end of a period of break, fracture. The modern Iraqi and Afghan constitutions, implemented after war, tremendous blood, and imposed from outside. Our independence constitutions, after great social movements in India, Ireland, Egypt in the first half of the 20thCentury, the 1920’s, 1930’s, 40’s. The US constitution, after a revolutionary war with the colonial British. The constitutionality of the British Parliament, in the 17th Century, the English Revolution, Cromwell, blood. So this is the period we are entering now. This is what is going to happen. Fracture. Contraction. And at the end of it, Professor Pantin and his team, if it is finished, will say, here, we have a constitution. Look, here it is.

And what will be the story of smelter in this period? Well, I have been thinking how to frame this, sitting there waiting to talk, to an audience as this one. This is how it is going to be. There are three entities involved in this struggle: the smelter itself, the architects of smelter and the activists. At the end of this story, of all the three entities, only one, one only, will be left standing. That is the way it is going to be. Thank you.

Wayne Kublalsingh

September 24th 2009

Trinidad Express Tuesday June 29th 2009

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article?id=161537957