This downloadable document is the 3rd April 2012 affidavit of then Minister of Finance Winston Dookeran, filed as the key evidence in the government’s case in reply to the High Court challenge mounted by Percy Farrell on behalf of a group of CLICO policyholders.

It is an important document since it is the official attempt to deal comprehensively with the claims that the new laws passed in 2011 to control the bailout were unconstitutional – those laws were the Central Bank (Amendment) Act, 2011 and the Purchase of Certain Rights and Validation Act, 2011. [To read the separate Bills progress in the House of Representatives, you can click here and here respectively.]

The most interesting ones are the paragraphs in which Dookeran states –

• Para 16 at which CLICO is identified as holding 53.6% of the insurance industry’s total liabilities in T&T.  That is a clear statement as to the extent to which this company was allowed to become literally ‘too big to fail’ and it also seems to me to comprise grounds for preventing this kind of over-concentration of risk to ever emerge again.
• Para 21 which details some $12Bn of public money already spent on this massive bailout.
• Para 22 which estimates that a further $12Bn of public money is needed to meet the creditors’ claims.
• Para 76 which confirms that the quarterly reports on the restructuring of CLICO for December 2011 and March 2012 have been filed in the High Court as required by the new laws cited above. 

I used this last paragraph to obtain those quarterly reports from the High Court – this is the FoI application dated 2012-05-08 and Quarterly Reports for March 2012 and December 2011 cited.

There will be more to say on this, as we need to delve into the accountability framework in relation to this exercise.

Expenditure of Public Money
 Minus         Transparency
 Minus       Accountability
 Equals          CORRUPTION