An act of desperation.

That’s how Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley described  Opposition Leader Kamla Persad’s Bissessar’s recent decision to come to the public and dish details on the proposal put forward by the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union which was rejected by government.

Speaking in a press conference at the Diplomatic Centre in St. Ann’s on Wednesday, Dr. Rowley said Persad-Bissessar’s utterances unjustly undermined government’s negotiation process.

“While the negotiations with Patriotic are in this very sensitive stage,  you have the Opposition Leader, who is a former Prime Minister, who is a Senior Counsel, pretending not to understand what I’m saying here…implying that the government has some under the table and underhand arrangements being made,” he said, insisting that contrary to the claims made on the United National Congress platform on Monday night, government was not in any “underhand deal” with any secret buyer.

“She launched a tirade against Trafigura. Suppose Trafigura takes the position that, ‘Look, you see Trinidad and Tobago, we have been accused of ‘xyz’, maybe we should give it a rest’. Where does that leave Patriotic?” he asked.

“Asking the government if we have a buyer on the side and that we are using Patriotic for some nefarious reason. The answer is no- we have nobody under the table, we have nobody on the bed, we have nobody on the side,” he said.

Dr. Rowley is of the view that the Opposition’s allegations of bubol surrounding the sale of the Petrotrin refinery, banks on a hope that the public is “sufficiently ignorant” regarding how such matters are handled.

He also believes it was an attempt to shift the focus away from her weekend scandal in which her communications team was exposed for copying a congratulatory message to US President-elect Joe Biden, which had originally been written by British politician, Keir Starmer.

“So I don’t know why the Opposition believes that she can drag herself out of her dismal condition this weekend, by surprising the country with news that she got in her mailbox- maybe the same place she got Mr. English MP congratulation from-a document that the refinery is going to be sold. There’s absolutely no news in that,” the Prime Minister said.

He added: “What we said publicly- and I as head of the government said so- if we cannot come to an acceptable agreement with Patriotic on this matter, having been selected as the preferred bidder…the exclusivity which we gave them for a year or two will end and the government will go back out to the market to see if there is anybody else out there who may make a proposal to us…in the same way we went out before”