Even though Business Minister, Dominic Gaskin had given a March 2019 deadline for the completion of the Local Content Policy, Head of the Energy Department, Dr. Mark Bynoe assured that the document would be ready way before that time.
He made this commitment during a press conference earlier today at the Ministry of the Presidency. There, Dr. Bynoe said that the impatience over the Policy is understandable. He noted however that it has been the aim of the Department to conduct several rounds of consultation with the private sector to understand how it believes the policy can best serve its interest.
In this regard, Dr. Bynoe said that the private sector was particularly concerned about refining the definition of what constitutes a local company as well as having clear penalties in place for breach of local content requirements by oil companies.
The Department Head said, “We want to ensure that the policy represents an inclusion of all the best comments we can get. And the businesses we had discussions with presented some good ideas… What we are going to do now is ensure we incorporate those into the next draft and then put together a Whitepaper which will be presented to the National Assembly before year end. The draft Policy will also be presented to the House for debate…”
Further to this, Dr. Bynoe said that the Department is working on recruiting an expert this month to ensure that the goals for the policy are achieved. He said that several expressions of interest have already been received.
