British Company Petrofac Wraps Up Its “Engineering” Contracts In Algeria And Lays Off Workers

Algerian employees of the departing British engineering Company “Petrofac” have appealed to Algeria’s energy minister and the CEO of Sonatrach Group to urgently intervene to save them from the specter of unemployment after the British Company decided to withdraw from engineering activities in Algeria earlier this week.

 The decision follows the demise of Petrofac’s 4-year contract in Algeria similarly to Saipem, RBS and other energy groups which were then partly active in the country. 

The latter have not committed themselves to setting up offices in Algeria itself and seriously investing in the long-term national engineering business. 

Several other energy companies all over the world have followed the same path by shutting down business activities owing to the current world energy downturn.

A letter signed by 17 Algerian engineers working for Petrofac of which “Echorouk” received a copy, said: “The enhancement of the national economy has been at the crux of the concerns of successive Governments and manifold economic programs, and a large part of these schemes were related to ensuring sustained training and transfer of expertise and the resettlement of proven skills in various fields of endeavor”.

In this context, they added:  “The National hydrocarbons Company Sonatrach is used  to bring foreign engineering companies and engage in projects worth billions of dollars, by notably providing for the establishment of local engineering subsidiaries  to train  Algerian employees  and thus gain in efficiency so as to allow for the setting up  of specialized national engineering companies and to ensure the national economic independence but this targeted endeavor has not been unfortunately achieved, and it dismally remains a mere ink on paper”.

The disgruntled dismissed Engineers in the same letter also stated that “these experiments were launched in the 1990s with PRC, Saipem and Wood Group. But all these companies were doomed to disappear.  

They woefully complained of repeating the experiment with the British company, Petrofac, which established an engineering  subsidiary in Algeria in 2012, with the involvement of  dozens of local engineering  skills after being awarded by Sonatrach, a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to transfer expertise and specialized engineering technology, but the woeful end of Petrofac did not differ from its predecessors”,  they underlined.

The laid-off Algerian workers further castigated what they called “the policy of patching up and squandering of public money by setting up big deals for companies that disappear as soon as their contracts expire without achieving their goal of transferring expertise and engineering technology,” wondering how long the fate of Algerian engineers and their hapless families will continue to be grossly manipulated by these unreliable foreign companies.