Prime Minister Gonsalves pleased with Petrocaribe deal

The ship Tradewind Moon docked at the island's Lowmans Bay on new facilities installed by the St. Vincent Electricity Services - Vinlec, and delivered approximately twelve thousand (12,000) barrels of diesel to the Power plant storage facility to be used for the generation of electricity.

Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves called it a significant development and he emphasised the importance of the agreement which St Vincent and the Grenadines and several other Caricom member states have signed with Venezuela to facilitate shipments of fuel.

Agreement praised

"The agreement envisaged not only trade in energy, but it envisaged trade in other goods and services" Dr Gonsalves said of the Petrocaribe arrangement.

He also pointed to other benefits:

"What came over from the Caracas energy accord to this new agreement was the financing arrangement. That is, anytime the price of energy on the market goes beyond 30 US dollars a barrel, that we pay sixty percent of the cost and get forty percent credit over a period of 25 years at one percent interest" he explained.

Prior to the fuel shipment which arrived in St Vincent on Wednesday, the country received over six thousand 10-kilogram cylinders of LPG from Venezuela last December.

Joint venture company

The two countries have now officially established a Joint Venture Company to facilitate trading in petroleum products, constructing and developing the adequate infrastructure for petroleum related business in St Vincent and the Grenadines and investing in social infrastructure projects.

	Fuel, that all important commodity that's so costly across the region

The countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States - OECS (which includes St Vincent) in particular, with their high energy costs, have been keen to access Venezuelan oil.

Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago have stayed away from the Petrocaribe deal.