WILLEMSTAD - According to the Director of the Curaçao Refinery (RdK), Marcelino de Lannoy, the Venezuelan state oil company PdVSA is not considered a serious candidate to operate the refinery in Curaçao. This has to do with the deplorable situation that Venezuela is currently in.

In Curaçao, people want the government to contact PdVSA, which, as the parent company of Refineria Isla, leased the Curaçao refinery and Bullen Bay for more than three decades until January this year.

Of the 900 Isla employees, 535 are still employed by RdK and Curaçao Refinery Utilities (CRU), which maintain the installations pending a new operator.

“Watch television, then you will see how people in Venezuela are suffering. Because of the sanctions from abroad, they cannot even buy a screw. Even the own refineries do not work. The oil must be imported from Iran,” says De Lannoy

The question of why the government does not contact parties that are interested is also followed by a clear message from both the RdK director and Prime Minister Eugene Rhuggenaath. Interested parties must report to RdK and go through the established process. De Lannoy: “That is an honest and confidential procedure. When politicians say they have talked to certain companies, I have fears. Because that means that there is a parallel process. People have previously been convicted of imprisonment for that.”

Anyone who is interested should report to RdK and nowhere else. “We are not excluding anyone, no country, no company,” said Prime Minister Rhuggenaath. “But it cannot be that someone enters through a back door. That is harmful to the country. The image of corruption ensures that companies will not come in the future because they do not want to infect their name.”