At a news con­fer­ence on Tues­day, Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said the de­ci­sion of the US De­part­ment of Trea­sury to re­voke T&T’s spe­cif­ic li­cences to un­der­take the de­vel­op­ment of the Drag­on and Cocuina-Man­akin gas fields “does not come nec­es­sar­i­ly as a sur­prise, see­ing how volatile things are, not on­ly with re­spect to the pol­i­cy with Venezuela, but what we are see­ing with the ap­pli­ca­tion of tar­iffs.”

Mr Young told the tele­vised news con­fer­ence that the Gov­ern­ment that he leads is go­ing to make an ap­pli­ca­tion to the US Gov­ern­ment to see if the re­vo­ca­tion of the li­cences can be amend­ed. He al­so said he has reached out to Mauri­cio Claver-Carone, the US spe­cial en­voy to Latin Amer­i­ca, and that a re­quest was put in to US Sec­re­tary of State, Mar­co Ru­bio, for a tele­phone call.

“Based on the per­son­al con­ver­sa­tions and dis­cus­sions that I have man­aged to have with the two gen­tle­men, as well as some oth­ers that we are pur­su­ing, I ex­pect that we will be giv­en an au­di­ence. I ex­pect that we will be giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to make our case.