(Trinidad Guardian) Niko Resources Limited, an international oil and natural gas exploration and production company, with its head office located in Calgary, Canada, says there have been been attempts to sabotage a seismic survey being conducted on the Guayaguayare block by people trying to extract money from the company. The allegation comes from the company’s country manager, Ajit Muralidharan, who confirmed in an interview yesterday that shots had been fired in the Guayaguayare forest at workers in an effort to intimidate the company to make job contracts available to certain individuals in the area.
Muralidharan said yesterday: “It is true that we have had these issues. We have been shot upon and even temporary bridges that we would have constructed to ensure that the workers can cross rivers have been burned in a general effort to sabotage the project and force us to pay out money to people.” He said the company and its contractors, Tesla and Upstream, had refused to bow to the pressure and the matter had been referred to the Ministry of National Security. Muralidharan said: “We have reported this to the highest levels of the Government including to the Ministers of Energy and National Security.”
Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine yesterday confirmed being aware of the matter and said he had passed it onto the relevant authorities. “I received reports from Niko Resources that alleged that there were major acts of sabotage during their seismic survey…This included the burning of a wooden bridge,” the minister said: “These reports were passed onto the Minister of National Security.” Muralidharan said the issue had even led to a three-week delay in the completion of the survey, with its completion date being pushed back to early January 2012 from its original completion date of mid-December.
“This delay has so far cost us more than $15 million on the project and we hope that there will not be further delays,” Niko’s country manager told the Guardian. He said the company had hired between 350 and 400 people from the Guayaguayare area and there were some in the community who were originally prepared to jeopardise the temporary jobs that had been created. He said: “To the credit of the community, we are now seeing people in the area standing up and saying they will not support the thuggery and they are beginning to stand up because they know we are providing jobs and at the peak we will provide as many as 600 jobs for people in the community.” Muralidharan said since the institution of the state of emergency, the company had also seen a marked decrease in the sabotage that was taking place.
He said it appeared that the criminal elements were unwilling to take the same chances and as a result they had been able to carry out their work without much bother. He said: “If anyone asked me, I would be one of the first to raise my hand and say I support the state of emergency because it has led to a reduction in the attacks on our workers and attempts to disrupt our operations.” The Guayaguayare block is part on land and part near shore and Muralidharan said the offshore aspect of the seismic survey had been completed and even though that too was not without its problems. Niko recently surpassed bpTT as the company with the most amount of acreage under this control.
