Other side of Mora Ven story

May 29, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

Jankie Persad was a master teacher at St Mary's College. He and his younger brother, Krishna, both well respected Tunapuna folk, grew up there in that sprawling provincial town, in a time when even the poorest of the poor lived their lives with the utmost adherence to accepted standards.

The Persad family was no different to any of the other families that made Tunapuna, well, Tunapuna.

Krishna at St Mary's was probably one of the most restrained, well-adjusted and thoughtful students coming in from the East by train, coming in from an eastern township, that was simply "far country" to administrators who were myopic, insensitive and ignorant even though they may have worn gowns.

It is hard to perceive the Dr Krishna Persad of the company, Krishna Persad and Associates, as some raving bull threatening people's lives as some of the recent daily reports would want to have us believe. You see, there is always a story behind the story.

The battle for Mora Ven Holdings Ltd with the main protagonists being Dr Persad and George Nicholas, and how the one out-manoeuvred the other to gain 51 per cent of the shares, is the story that has been projected by the media. We need though to see the other story.

Krishna Persad spent almost his entire life studying petroleum and the petroleum industry particularly in context of, and as it pertains to, the economic development of T&T. After becoming a petroleum engineer he worked in the industry for a number of years before venturing forth on his own.

At the time most of the big multinational oil companies operating in T&T were abandoning land drilling for the more lucrative marine drilling. Persad saw an opportunity for small outfits to take over land exploration and, utilising established methods of secondary recovery, to explore already drilled areas.

It was his success in establishing a small outfit in a sector of only big sharks that endeared him to the population. One recalls his regular publication of a newsletter forecasting the trends in the industry locally and internationally.

The boy from Tunapuna had fearlessly and single-handedly faced and surmounted all obstacles and carved a niche market from scratch.

Not only that but after his successes in land exploration, he turned his attention to the lucrative marine sites that are leased from the State.

To move to marine exploration he had by necessity to take his private company on to the Stock Exchange and unto the realms of the public domain.

Mora Ven Holdings Ltd and Mora Oil Ventures Ltd were the result of all this, with revenues from oil and gas from five wells on the Mora Capital "A" platform and an overall asset-base of some $141 million. A nice juicy plum ripe and ready for a hostile takeover.

Persad and family had maintained 30 per cent of the shares all along but by February of this year the picture began to change drastically as George Nicholas proved capable of getting shareholders to switch their allegiance and to promise to sell their shares to him.

Last week's shareholders meeting at Normandie saw Nicholas gain a slight majority of shareholders, enough to provide him with control and enough to reconstitute the board, kicking Krishna and four other directors off.

Strange indeed because since December 2001, Krishna had publicly offered to purchase shares from shareholders at $2.20 a share, then trading at $1.65, and to issue five new shares of Mora Oil Ventures Ltd for every four shares of Mora Ven Holdings. After last week's doings, Krishna stands to lose his life's work.

But here is the other picture: George Nicholas' father came here in the mid-sixties, to the land of opportunity, and set up a paper bag factory with ancient re-conditioned equipment on the highway at the back of Barataria. We used to refer to him as the "brown-paper-bag man". Totally nondescript.

He then could hardly string together English words to make one coherent sentence. From selling ten cents paper bags then, to now, the Nicholas family has risen phoenix-like to own Customs House building, to buy out Holiday Inn and change it to Crowne Plaza, to buy out Union Club building and presently be erecting on that site what is destined to be one of the tallest and by far the prettiest building in the city of Port-of-Spain.

But how are they, the Nicholas family, to be judged, if not by the sheer weight of their wealth?

Are we to take sides? Which of the two protagonists best represents the core values to which we hold dear? And what guarantees or regulations can the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) come up with to prevent people losing their life's work through such hostile takeovers?

Or will we just stand aside and allow them to tear themselves to bits through internecine warfare? Already it seems they have both installed armed bodyguards!