The Colman Commission – The Importance of Money

Sir Anthony Colman, QC. Photo courtesy Guardian Media Ltd. The Colman Commission was established about a year ago as a Public Enquiry into the failure of the CL Financial group, some of its subsidiaries, and the Hindu Credit Union. The Commission is also mandated to report on the causes of these costly failures, so that it can make recommendations for possible prosecutions and the regulatory or systemic changes needed to avoid further collapses.

There has been a lot of fresh information revealed at the Commission and that is good, since the public now has a much better view of the various episodes behind the scenes. The sole Commissioner, Sir Anthony Colman, has now made a statement which outlines his progress in this huge and complex matter. Colman expects to take at least one more year and will be continuing his examination of the HCU matter when the CL Financial stage is completed.

Despite all the evidence about staggering sums of money and the heated public discussion that has sparked, I am perturbed by the way the essential information is being handled.

Since it is a Public Enquiry into a huge financial collapse, the financial information has to be front and centre if we are to get at the facts.

It is common knowledge that the link between performance and pay is essential in obtaining quality results in any competitive situation. That basic fact, with which most people would agree, is now seriously challenged by some of the key events in the global financial meltdown. It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into the new learning emerging from this global crisis, suffice to say that the old learning has literally been ‘tested to destruction’.

An unhealthy relationship between pay and performance would be a problem for any company, but in a financial company the issue is worse. That is because the investors expect those companies to endure and prosper, so that they can collect the expected returns.

The Colman Commission will be unable to fulfill its mandate if it does not uncover the relationship between pay and performance in the failed companies. Colman will also need to consider the motives and behaviour of the investors, who must also form a significant part of the story. Without their participation and investments, the failed companies would have had no money to lose.

There is a strong interest in keeping the real figures and circumstances out of the news and some of the main items are –

The Accounts
The true levels of salaries, fees, dividends and bonuses
The identities and sums of money returned to those who have benefited from the bailout
The delinquent borrowers who owe the failed companies huge sums of money
The extent to which the failed companies and their chiefs complied with our tax laws

In ‘The Colman Commission – Cloudy Concessions’, published here on 1 September, 2011, I pointed out the danger of allowing the HCU claimants to testify without stating the amounts invested for the public record. It was my view that those concessions represented the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ in terms of the entire exercise being a Public Enquiry into a series of financial collapses.

In this recent, third session of evidence Hearings, we have had three examples of the ‘widening wedge’ in respect of financial information.

The first example is the recent imbroglio on the testimony of the CEO of Methanol Holdings (MHTL), in which significant financial information was excluded, apparently by agreement between the various parties and the Commission. This is exactly the kind of danger I had been warning about, since MHTL is a significant, supposedly healthy, part of the failed CL Financial group and there is bound to be considerable public interest in its financial performance. Yet, the Colman Commission agreed to exclude that financial information, so the public is none the wiser as to the overall health of the CLF group, despite paying for a public Enquiry. This issue was highlighted in the Guardian editorial of Tuesday 15 November, 2011, which ended by emphasizing the public’s right to know.
The second example was the decision on Directors’ monies – as reported in the Business page of this newspaper on 16 November, 2011 “…Commission Colman has ruled that the means of remuneration for CL Financial officials should be disclosed to the Commission but not the actual quantification of them…”. That bizarre concession removed any possibility of reporting on the real state of affairs at these failed companies. If the Commission continued with that arrangement, it would have been impossible for any real understanding of the crisis and its causes to be derived from their work.
The third, most notable, example was even more noteworthy, being the reversal of that decision and the grounds for that reversal, as reported in the Express of 16 November, 2011

…The board appearance fee was revealed yesterday on the same day that Sir Anthony Colman, the lone commissioner in the Commission of Enquiry, ruled that the remuneration packages of those involved with the conglomerates collapse could be made public….

Colman yesterday reversed a decision he made on Tuesday…

“My attention has been drawn to the fact that in fact some evidence has already been circulated in regard to Mr (Michael) Carballo’s remuneration package and also Mr (Lawrence) Duprey’s remuneration,” Colman said.

“I have come to the conclusion that it would be grossly unfair if there were a general bar on further evidence as to remuneration of participants so I reverse the ruling which I made yesterday and the result would be that the remuneration of participants can be put into evidence,” he said.

“I do not accept that if the remuneration emanated from any of the companies involved there could be any question of confidentiality,” Colman said”

It is remarkable to me that an appeal restricted to the principle of fair-play seemed to have caused this reversal, in a situation where the initial concession was toxic to the fundamental enquiry which is being conducted at public expense, supposedly for our benefit.

This is an Enquiry into a colossal financial collapse, so therefore the money must be front and centre at all times. We must have scrutiny as to its origin, rationale/contract for payment and its disposition for tax purposes.

Sir Anthony Colman needs to be watchful of the wily attorneys, who may seek again to tempt him to agree to conceal some more financial information which might be awkward for their clients. The fact is that all those companies are now being funded by the Treasury and we have a right to know what caused this huge mess.

It is not a concession, we now own the mess, so we must be allowed to see all of its parts. No sacred cows.

Sidebar: Colman’s Challenge

Colman’s statement as to the difficulty of running the Enquiry was most instructive, with a total of 49 lawyers appearing for various parties and a further 5 for the Commission.

Colman has had to maneuvre between 18 parties to the Enquiry, three non-parties and over 800,000 documents.

Which only makes it all the more important that the Colman Commission be given the necessary administrative/legal support and multi-media resources so that it can better serve the purposes for which it was established.

We have the resources in this country to give each SEA student a new laptop, so it should be no challenge to provide those resources to the Colman Commission.

CL Financial bailout – The Final Solution?

The new bailout formula was approved, as two new Acts, by our Parliament on 14 September –

The first one prevents any lawsuits against the Central Bank by claimants, while the second gives the Minister of Finance the right to borrow up to $10.7Bn and places the Republic Bank Ltd. (RBL) shares formerly held by CLICO into a new investment vehicle, NEL 2.

These seem to represent what I am calling the Final Solution, in that the clamour and protest which had marked the last year seems to have been fading away. There have been queries from the various ‘Policyholders’ groups’, but those have been limited.

Whatever one thinks of the actual bailout, which I maintain is a perversion of our Treasury, there are valuable lessons to be learned from all this. The main lesson for me is the Power of the Few. In that although only about 16,000 investors were affected, they were able to mount a successful campaign to improve their position. We need to note that lobbying and campaigning can be effective in gaining benefits for limited groups. To all the weak-hearts who say nothing ever changes, please take note.

We also saw the position set out by the PM in her important speech on 1 October 2010 being reversed, in that the claimants’ rights to sue the Central Bank have been extinguished. There are rumblings about a challenge to the constitutionality of that restriction, but we will have to wait on that one to play out. The fact that the right to challenge the Central Bank’s actions in respect of the bailout has been removed opens fresh dangers in terms of the payout process.

We have all had bad experiences of what usually happens when serious unrestricted power is held by someone who does not have to answer for their actions. My concern is that there does not seem to be any avenue for oversight of or appeal/redress against the Central Bank, in the event that claimants feel they are receiving unfair treatment. That concern will have to be addressed at some stage.

Even as an account of the payout, we have deficient reporting with no true profile of the wealth being returned having been presented for public consideration. The Central Bank and Ministry of Finance is in possession of this critical information as to the amounts of money to be returned to claimants, but that is being suppressed, for whatever reason. This episode has been a real stain on our stated ambitions towards accountability, transparency and the ever-distant ‘Good Governance’.

A related point is that the PM gave a clear commitment to revealing who benefited from the first wave of bailout funds, said at the time to be of the order of $7.3Bn. The PM’s speech is at pages 19 to 34 of Hansard – at pg 24 –

…The previous administration injected $5 billion into Clico and they spent $2.3 billion to bail out the other distressed entities such as CIB in particular, so coming to a total of $7.3 billion has gone into that hole and yet today the Government and, therefore, the taxpayers of this country have been called upon to come up with another $16 billion to $19 billion. So what happened to that $7.3 billion? Where did it go? Who are the people that were paid? How was it utilized? What happened to that $7.3 billion?…

The concern here is that we are not at all sure that this new arrangement will in fact yield the required information as to who are the real beneficiaries of this bailout. In view of the fact that the entire deal is a burden on our Treasury, this opaque arrangement is unacceptable.

After all –

Expenditure of Public money – Accountability – Transparency = CORRUPTION

Quite apart from those concerns, the fact is that provisions should have been made for Anti-Money Laundering and Tax Evasion screening. The Treasury must not be used for Money-Laundering and the proper safeguards need to be put in place to prevent this.

The lack of accounts for the CL Financial group, after 31 months under State management, is also unacceptable. The essential terms of the bailout are being sidelined, since the original agreement was for the State injections of cash to be repaid via asset sales. Both 2009 agreements – the January MoU and the June CL Financial Shareholders’ Agreement – also spoke to the preparation of accounts and provision of information.

The perturbing aspect is that there continues to be a uniform silence as to the preparation of these overdue accounts, so the taxpayer must wonder just how, or if ever, these vast sums of bailout money are to be recovered. This is the burning question which is at the root of my outrage.

The new arrangement is also silent as to the position with respect to other creditors of the CL Financial group, so there is no certainty as to how those claims would be treated. On 31 October, Trinidad and Tobago Newday reported on ‘CLICO Bahamas seeks $365M from CL Financial’. There are substantial regional and local claims outstanding, so the entire cost appears is an unknown quantity at this time, given the lack of accounts.

As I pointed out previously, the Directors and Officers of the CL Financial group and its subsidiaries ought to be subject to the provisions of the Integrity in Public Life Act, by reason of its being a State-controlled company. The Integrity Commission needs to demand the required declarations from those persons, if we are to secure the required level of transparency.

The continuing failure of the Central Bank to make rulings as to the extent to which CL Financial’s Directors and Officers at the time of the collapse are ‘fit and proper persons’ is the final piece of the sorry picture.

The State’s period controlling the CL Financial group, ends on 11 June 2012 – a mere 7 months away – at which time the group will return to its owners. Given the fact that the Central Bank has not made an adverse ‘Fit & Proper’ finding against Lawrence Duprey, in the absence of accounts and with a significant part of the RBL shares divested in this fashion, what will be the out-come? Is the stage now set for Lawrence Duprey to return?

I spent last Wednesday afternoon in New York’s Zucotti Park, with so many points to share on that experience. For now, I leave this striking slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement –

If you are not outraged, you haven’t been paying attention…

AUDIO: High Noon Interview – 22 September 2011

Power 102 FM

Afra Raymond is interviewed on the “Centre Stage” show on Power 102 FM in Trinidad and Tobago, hosted by Chris Seon, Cliff Learmond and Sherma Wilson, on the Colman Commission and the revelations and possible consequences.

Programme Date: Thurday, 22 September 2011
Programme Length: 0:23:21

The Colman Commission – Preserving Natural Justice

Following my last article on the Colman Commission –Balancing the Scale – in which the recent private meeting of Attorneys was discussed, I wrote the following to its Secretary.

From: Afra Raymond <afraraymond@gmail.com>
To: judith gonzalez <comsecclfhcu@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 9:02 AM
Subject: To the Colman Commission

To – Judith Gonzalez, Secretary to the Colman Commission

Dear Ms. Gonzalez,

I was perturbed to learn, only recently, that the Commission had convened a meeting on Friday 8th July at which one of the items discussed was whether my various submissions should be admitted as evidence and if so, what should be the ‘status’ accorded it.

Here we had the situation of a Public Enquiry into a matter of Public concern, convening a private meeting which discussed as one item of business my inclusion as a witness. As a participant in the Enquiry, not a party, I was excluded from the discussion as to whether my evidence should be omitted…I was not invited to that meeting and only found about this afterwards, almost in passing. I also understand that the various parties are to be given the opportunity to make submissions on those issues on my testimony, on which the Commissioner can make a ruling.

My work on this matter of grave public concern has been a solo exercise, except for the occasional assistance of friends. I am without legal representation at this important forum.

Given the substantial parties involved – all of whom are represented by attorneys – and the limits placed on my input by the Commission’s decision to deny me the status of a party, one can scarcely imagine a more lop-sided scenario than this one. Natural Justice is not negotiable.

All that said, the meeting in question has already taken place, so I am requesting that you give proper consideration to inviting my participation when this matter is next to be discussed.

Thank you for your consideration.

Afra Raymond

www.afraraymond.com

The Colman Commission – Balancing the Scale

The Colman Commission into the failure of CLF Financial and the Hindu Credit Union is just about to move into its second round of Hearings and the public can expect to have further testimony on the losses suffered by people who deposited monies with CL Financial.

I have made several submissions to the Commission and have been invited to give evidence. I am reliably informed that there have been strong and unanimous objections to my participation in the Colman Commission. It would seem that only the Commission itself is interested in having my testimony go onto the record.

It is not surprising to me that objections of that sort would be arising now, but readers need to have a context.

The Colman Commission was established to find out how this fiasco occurred, recommend methods to stop a recurrence and also to identify responsible people who are apt for lawsuits or criminal charges. The main parties can be expected to give self-serving evidence, designed to exonerate themselves from any blame. We can also expect to hear more attempts to put the blame onto Wall Street, despite the claims in the CL Financial 2007 Annual Report– this is from the preamble –

…“The Next Wave of Growth” is the theme of this annual report, highlighting, to quote our Chairman, “that out of any crisis opportunities will emerge and our progress during the year under review prepares us to seize those opportunities and unlock value.” We have confidence in our ability to not only navigate this financial storm but to find fresh and profitable opportunities within it…

That Annual Report was published on 23 January 2009 – yes, that is 10 days after Duprey wrote to the Central Bank Governor for urgent financial assistance and one week before the bailout was signed on 30 January.

The Colman Commission is a Public Inquiry into a matter of major importance; it was approved by the Cabinet and installed by the President of the Republic. A Commission of Enquiry can only make findings on the evidence submitted to it, so it would be very important for some people to have certain evidence omitted.

One of the most outrageous aspects of the entire Uff Enquiry was the use of public money by UDECOTT to attempt to block certain documents coming into evidence. Those various attempts to limit the scope of the Uff Enquiry were disgusting to all right-thinking people and seemed to be a straight case of the ‘tail wagging the dog‘.

It is unacceptable that the Ministry of Finance could be taking a position which is seeking to exclude my evidence from the Commission. If that were so, it would mean that Ministry is acting in a manner which effectively dilutes the Commission and what is more, appears to be incompatible with the intention of the Cabinet to have a full public enquiry into this matter of national concern. In addition, the Central Bank is also reported to have objected.

The Colman Commission needs to be robust in getting at the truth of this financial disaster.

The new Bailout Plan

At the time of writing I have no details of the new bailout plan, proposed to be laid in Parliament for debate on Wednesday 14 September. According to a report in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, the proposed plan is in two limbs, the first includes the issuance of new bonds to raise monies for the payment of policyholders, while the second is the creation of a prohibition against lawsuits against the Central Bank.

The three concerns I have at this stage are –

Accounts– The last published audited accounts for the CL Financial group were for 2007, but despite the tremendous resources which have been deployed by the State in this matter there is no clue as to when accounts are to be brought up to date. Given that both the 2009 agreements – the MoU of 30 January 2009 and the CL Financial Shareholders Agreement of 12 June 2009– exist in a framework of State funds being paid to the group’s creditors and recovered by asset sales, this situation is totally unacceptable. What is more, there has never been any attempt to explain the delay in completing those accounts.
As a result we have two insurance companies operating in our country without any accounts, which is in breach of the very regulatory framework of the Central Bank.

The Finance Minister must address these relevant concerns if this proposal is to gain any support. It brings to mind the recent point made by Independent Senator Subhas Ramkhelewan, in debating the recent proposals to increase the State borrowing limits, that the Parliament needs proper details of the ways in which those monies are proposed to be spent, because no person could borrow money from a diligent lender without giving details. We need, as a country, to insist on these higher standards.

We need to move away from the black box and the magician’s hat, towards a more transparent situation in which large-scale public spending decisions are based on a solid series of rationales.
Colman Commission – The concern here is that the second limb of this proposal will prevent lawsuits against the Central Bank; at this point I am not sure if that only applies to CL Financial-related matters. The Terms of Reference of the Colman Commission state –

…2. To make such findings, observations ad (sic) recommendations arising out of its deliberations, as may be deemed appropriate, in relation to:

(i) whether there are any grounds for criminal and civil proceedings against any person or entity; whether criminal proceedings should therefore be recommended to the Director of Public Prosecutions for his consideration; and whether civil proceedings should be recommended to the Attorney General for his consideration;

It seems to me that the result of these proposals could be to thwart that part of the functions of the Colman Commission as they relate to the Central Bank.
Insurance Act – Finally, I am concerned that as we are on the eve of a possible ‘solution’ to the problems of the policyholders, there may be other fragile insurance companies with solvency issues. The fact that these matters are now so high on the public agenda means that we should not waste the opportunity to bring forward the new Insurance Bill, which has been drafted for some time, for discussion.

It is at moments like this that a responsible and long-term approach to these huge issues is in the interest of the entire nation.

CORRECTION

In this article, which was published on September 13th 2011, I stated that there were unanimous objections to my appearance as a witness at the Colman Commission. I wrote that on the basis of certain reports given to me by persons who were present at those meetings, but after receiving a challenge from the attorneys for the Trinidad & Tobago Securities & Exchange Commission (TTSEC), it was impossible to corroborate that aspect of the article – i.e. that the TTSEC had objected to my appearance.

This notice is to correct the record in that respect, I do regret any inconvenience or damage caused to the TTSEC by my publication of those allegations. – a Correction with similar effect was published in the Business Guardian of 18th November and I do regret the delay in publishing this one here for blog-readers.

Afra Raymond

Fifth submission to the Commission of Enquiry into the failure of CL Financial Limited, et al

9^th September 2011

Afra Raymond’s fifth submission to the

Commission of Enquiry into the failure of
CL Financial Limited
Colonial Life Insurance Company (Trinidad) Limited
Clico Investment Bank Limited
Caribbean Money Market Brokers Limited and
The Hindu Credit Union Credit Union Co-operative Society Limited

My name is Afra Martin Raymond and I am a Chartered Surveyor, being a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. I am Managing Director of Raymond & Pierre Limited – Chartered Valuation Surveyors, Real Estate Agents and Property Consultants. I am also the President of the Joint Consultative Council for the Construction Industry (JCC), an umbrella organisation which represents the interests of Engineers, Surveyors, Architects, Town Planners and Contractors in this Republic.

This submission is being made in my personal capacity and does not represent the position of either Raymond & Pierre Limited or the JCC.

My work on this vital issue can be seen at www.afraraymond.com.

I am willing to give oral evidence before the Commission.

This submission is supplementary, providing an update on the work which I have published since the fourth 4^th July 2011.

The three articles in this submission are –

Date of Publication	Title	Abstract
6th July 2011	Colman Commission considerations	Questioning the reluctance of persons who lost monies in the CL Financial fiasco to appear as witnesses.
27th July 2011	Lessons from the Financial Crisis	Probing the causes and consequences of the crisis.
30th August 2011	The Colman Commission – Cloudy Concessions	The concession to allow witnesses’ statements as to the quantum of their investments to go unpublished is critiqued.

I do believe all the items in this submission to be true and correct.

……………………………………………..
Afra M. Raymond B.Sc. FRICS
http://www.afraraymond.com

Apt. #14, Highsquare Condominiums,
1a Dere Street,
Port-of-Spain
625 8168 (h)
678 9802/350 6215 (c)
625 6230 (d)
afraraymond@gmail.com

The Colman Commission – Cloudy Concessions

The Colman Commission held its first session of Hearings in the last week of June, so we were able to have moving reports from witnesses who had lost-out from various investments with the Hindu Credit Union (HCU).

I read those transcripts and it was painful to see the shape of this problem. The most striking aspect for me was that the various attorneys seemed to have struck a compromise as to the parts of that evidence which would form part of the public record.

hcu-muzzled — HCU Investors were allowed by the Colman Commission not to state investment amounts. They seemed to set the agenda.

The main concession was that those witnesses did not have to state the amount of their investments for the record. The reasoning seems to have been a stated fear of crime, but it is my view that this concession will compromise the effectiveness of the Colman Commission. Given that the Commission is scheduled to resume its Hearings on 19 September, it seems timely to put these matters forward now.

To begin with, the two Golden Rules of investment are –

The Risk and Reward paradigm – Risk and Reward have an inescapable relationship – i.e. the greater the Risk, the greater the Reward and vice versa.
Investments need to be spread out so as to avoid undue concentration of risk – in colloquial terms, you should not put all your eggs into one basket, or bet all your money on one horse.

From these time-honoured ‘Golden Rules’, we derived the ‘Prudential Criteria’ which guide how financial institutions balance risk and reward.

Yet, despite the ‘Golden Rules’ the CLF and HCU chiefs were able to devise products which tempted tens of thousands of people to abandon those basic safeguards and invest in their products. People who were normally sensible were tempted to abandon good sense and break both ‘Golden Rules’. That is the measure of this tragedy.

Another point is that it was not only individuals who made that type of error, there were other people, with responsibility for managing monies, who also gave into the various temptations. The sidebar has details on that.

Let us be clear that the scope of this fiasco is as broad as it is deep, with boundaries stretching from the delayed and misleading accounts to the mismatched funding/investment practices of the core companies, from the absence of proper corporate governance described by Dr. Euric Bobb to the negative impact of the extensive political donations made by the CLF group. The Executive Flexible Premium Annuity (EFPA) is at the heart of the tragedy – the most successful investment product ever designed and built in the Caribbean, while being, at one and the same time, arguably the most toxic.

The duty of the Colman Commission is to probe how this fiasco occurred, recommend methods to stop a recurrence and also to identify responsible people who are apt for lawsuits or criminal charges.

We are now contemplating an inquiry into a large-scale financial collapse, which appears to have conceded the right of witnesses to withhold details about their investments. We are able to read the name and age of the witness, but effectively barred from information as to the size of their investment or the proportion of their total portfolio that figure represents. A Public Enquiry into a financial failure has conceded the right of the public to the basic financial information. I say basic, because the fact is that without those thousands of EFPA and INC investments, there would not have been the cashflow to allow CL Financial to embark on that fateful journey.

This appears to me to be a cloudy concession, to say the least, since it might represent the thin edge of the wedge in setting a precedent to allow subsequent witnesses to try obscuring or omitting financial details. More importantly, the effect of that kind of concession is that it will almost certainly mask the extent to which the basic financial rules were violated. That is not a philosophical question, because the CLF disaster only attained this scale and consequence as a result of these basic rules being broken. Ergo, it is not at all possible to credibly examine the causes of the crisis, if one has conceded that those are areas which will not be publicly examined.

There was public campaign to persuade people to make these risky investments. That campaign was calculated to have them set aside the norms of good sense – the ‘Golden Rules’ were abandoned. The Agents, many of whom masqueraded as ‘Investment Advisors’, appealed to people to close-off their other accounts and sell other investments so as to put as many eggs into that one basket as possible. After all, the more money you put with them, is the more interest CL Financial was offering. We all know that is how the thing went.

At the same time, these agents were busy telling people that their product offered these tremendous rates of return and complete security of funds, etc. etc. I bet everyone reading this heard those lyrics, at least once.

This concession is short-sighted and I am urging the Colman Commission to reconsider its position urgently. There must be no easy concession to allow less light.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The depth of this tragedy can only be plumbed if we are able to see the true extent to which the ‘Golden Rules’ were broken.

The Colman Commission has to keep its focus. That concession needs to be renegotiated, if it is not already too late.

SIDEBAR: The levels of responsible investors

Apart from the individual investors who suffered from their misplaced faith in the CL Financial and HCU Products, there are others who also need to be examined by the Colman Commission if we are to have a proper picture of those events.

Firstly, there are the Credit Unions, who were acting for many small and relatively unsophisticated investors. Several Credit Unions placed heavy investments into these EFPA products, which of course was a product approved for individual investors. The nature and extent of those Credit Union investments need to be a living part of this enquiry.

Secondly, there were yet another species of large-scale investors who were the chiefs of the State-owned National Gas Company (NGC) and the nation’s largest pension plan, the National Insurance Board. Those two companies were reported to have invested the sums of $1.1Bn and $700M, respectively, in a Clico Investment Bank (CIB) product called the Investment Note Certificate (INC). This was another ‘gravity-defying’ product which offered attractive rates of interest along with the guarantee of being backed by good-quality investments. Like a close relative of the EFPA. In ‘Taking in Front’ published here on 25^th April 2010, I examined the NGC’s involvement in those CIB products. At one point, up to 40% of NGC’s money was with the CL Financial group, so it is clear that its own Board policy on the placement of large-scale, short-term deposits did not insulate that State Enterprise from the temptations which afflicted others.

Given that the highest levels of commission were paid to the agents for these products which yielded so much cash for the CL Financial group, Colman has to ask whether inducements were ever offered to these people in positions of trust. Apart from the question of possible inducements, the real question is whether the kind of over-concentration of deposits which exists is at all compatible with the proper execution of one’s fiduciary duty. Colman will never know unless he withdraws that fatal concession.

Property Matters – State Enterprise Accounts

State Enterprise Performance Monitoring Manual
In the next few weeks, this column will cover some of the issues which are likely to have a bearing on the 2012 Budget.

In my view the State and its Agencies must perform in an exemplary fashion if we are to progress. A good example is worth a thousand words.

At page 22 of the 2010-2011 budget statement, the Minister of Finance said –

…Mr. Speaker, no coherent, co-ordinated planning or strategy for state enterprises exists. As a result we have begun to rationalise the state enterprises, including the special purpose companies, which will incorporate a new accountability system that goes beyond the presently operating company ordinances. It is these loopholes in public accountability that resulted in the UdeCOTT scandal. This must never again happen in Trinidad and Tobago…

The Ministry of Finance has now published a new State Enterprises Performance Monitoring Manual 2011, it is over three times longer than the previous edition, so it will be something to consider in weeks to come.

Certainly, there are stricter requirements in relation to the filing of accounts – at pg 30 of the 2011 guidelines –

3.2.5 AUDITED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

State Enterprises are required to submit the following:

Audited Financial Statements (2 originals and 120 copies) to the Minister of Finance within four (4) months of their financial year end. These reports are to be laid in Parliament and subsequently submitted to the Public Accounts and Enterprises Committee for consideration;

Copies of their Management letters issued by Statutory Auditors…

At pg 16 of the 2008 edition –

1.3.10 Publishing of Financial Statements by State Enterprises

Government has agreed that State Enterprises be required to publish in at least one (1) major daily newspaper a summary of the audited financial statements within four (4) months to the end of their financial year and a summary of the unaudited half-yearly statements within two (2) months of the mid-year date.

Such summary statements must be in accordance with the requirements of the Securities Industry Act, 1995.

The new guidelines appear to be stricter, but the requirement to publish to the press seems to have been removed.

There are swirling issues on this –

No accounts for years – As I have pointed out before, some of the largest State Enterprises have published no accounts for years. UDECOTT and NHA/HDC are just two examples of this flagrant breach of the shareholders’ instructions as set out above. In the case of HDC, there is a greater concern in my view, since sections 18, 19 and 20 of the HDC Act require the audited accounts to be produced and published. Anyhow you try to spin it, those are terrible signs. For a private company to have no accounts, for even a few months, is indicative of poor performance at the very least. No accounts for years is unacceptable. One can only wonder how clearly could anyone plan if basic information is being obscured in this fashion. We expect better from the chiefs of these State Enterprises and certainly we expect better from the Peoples’ Partnership. In his preamble to the 2010-2011 budget, Minister Dookeran said –

…We must at all times remember who we work for. We must make Government work for the people. As our Prime Minister always says: serve the people, serve the people, serve the people…

Serious debts outstanding – There are continuing reports, despite some efforts, that contractors, consultants and suppliers are owed substantial monies by State Enterprises for extended periods. That has a disastrous effect on our local economy both on an immediate tangible level and in terms of the more subjective element of confidence.
Ambitious new projects continue to be announced, even as the basic accounts are incomplete and substantial bills remain unpaid.

Apart from the evident confusion, at the very highest levels of the State and Government, the unacceptable part is that there is not even an attempt to explain what is the hold-up or what areas of the accounts remain unresolved. The few times anyone in authority has attempted to explain the delays in those accounts, it has been a model of vagueness and ambiguity. That uncommunicative behaviour does not augur well. These State Enterprises are not building a wartime bunker or a new spy satellite, only new homes and offices.

But there is more, according to S. 99 (1) of the Companies Act 1995

every Director of a company shall in exercising his powers and discharging his duties act honestly and in good faith with a view to the best interests of the company; and
exercise the care, diligence and skill that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in comparable circumstances.

Those provisions make mismanagement of a company an offence. It is literally impossible to manage or direct the affairs of a multi-billion dollar company in the absence of audited accounts. So there must be serious concerns as to how the Directors of those State Enterprises without accounts could have properly discharged their obligations under S. 99 (1).

SEC logo Apart from these points, there is now the fact that the SEC has made Orders in respect of Contraventions of the Securities Industry Act 1995 and the Securities Industry Bye-Laws 1997. Those Orders are in relation to the failure of these huge State-owned Enterprises to publish their accounts –

19th March 2010 against HDC, with fines totalling $121,000 – see http://www.ttsec.org.tt/content/pub100326.pdf.
15th June 2011 against UDECOTT, with fines totalling $120,000 – see http://www.ttsec.org.tt/content/Order-for-settlement-re-UDECOTT.pdf.
25th July 2011 against HDC, with fines totalling $400,000 – see http://www.ttsec.org.tt/content/Order-for-settlement-re-Trinidad-and-Tobago-Housing-Development-Corporation.pdf.

I was pleased to see the SEC taking this firm action against these offending State Enterprises, it is an important and necessary intervention. I am not at all sure what, if any, ongoing penalties are being applied. If there are no ongoing punishments or fines, this important regulator needs to take a tougher stand. It is simply not good enough in my view for the regulator to levy these fines and allow the companies to carry on with ‘business as usual‘. That would be like a dutiful policeman ticketing a motorist for smooth tires, no seatbelt and no headlights – issuing the ticket and then letting that motorist drive off. The SEC needs to consider heavy daily fines and banning orders against Directors of these companies in breach of the law, if such do not already exist.

The era of irresponsibility in high office needs to be brought to a close. The role of the Treasury in supporting this grossly irresponsible behaviour is questionable. The silence on the missing accounts is intolerable. The chapter of getting away with it needs to be ended.

Expenditure of Public money – Accountability – Transparency = CORRUPTION

CL Financial Bailout – Lessons from the Financial Crisis

This is an edited version of my address to the 4^th Biennial Business Banking and Finance Conference (BBF4) held at the Trinidad Hilton from 22 to 24 June, 2011. The session I participated in was devoted to ‘Lessons from the Financial Crisis: The Resolution of Failed Entities.’ [See the acknowledgement letter from the conference convenor here.]

Thanks for the invitation to speak at this forum, it was last-minute, but welcome, since our local Institutions of Higher Learning have not spent the necessary time to explain and analyse this financial fiasco. I have been very critical of the Institute of Business, the Institute of Social and Economic Research, the Faculties of Economics and Management and the Caribbean Centre for Money & Finance, so it is great to see you making a start on this overdue work. It is my pleasure to participate in these proceedings.

I want to start by shifting focus to the arena of the mind and the existence of elements such as moral and ethical values, as well as social standards. In 1971 there was a famous series of psychological experiments in which selected students entered a two-week role-play as prison-guards in control of other people who were playing the role of prisoners.

That experiment was conducted at Stanford University in California and the results were that most of the prison guards adopted cruel behaviour with most of them being upset when the experiment was stopped after only six days. The entire experiment was filmed and the prisoners suffered from regular acts of wickedness, abuse and sheer perversity – one-third of the guards acted sadistically.

The Stanford Prison Experiment as it is now known, was heavily criticised as being unethical and unprofessional. Of course the other aspect is that it re-opened the perennial discussion into the nature of things. The nature of our nature, as it were – ‘Are we humans naturally evil and cruel?‘ The learning seems to be that well-adjusted and reasonable people can very quickly lose their moral compass in a situation with a lack of the conventional controls such as disapproval and laws.

No surprise to those familiar with history and politics, but the lesson for us in T&T is that if you let people get the idea that they can never be punished, there is virtually no limit to the rules they will break. Asset-stripping, Bribery and Corruption can become the new norms of a governing class and that is what has happened in our country.

We have never had a strong tradition of detecting and punishing White-Collar Criminals, so if we are to make a start in terms of the resolution of failed entities, that has to be the starting-point. We cannot reconstruct or resolve the failed entities if we do not change that aspect of our culture – the absence of consequence has to be abolished.

The absence of consequence is inimical to any development – personal, national or regional. It is no point bringing new regulations or ‘approaches’ to this huge problem, until and unless the basic culture changes.

So that is the challenge for us – we have to change the way we think and behave around these issues of White-Collar Crime. It is a very damaging type of crime which can affect the lives of many, many people – as we have seen in the CL Financial fiasco. But we have to make that choice to change our culture around these issues.

The current financial disaster amounts to the greatest ever destruction of capital in peacetime – these are literally epochal events, but we do need to be careful as there is yet another big lie out there. It suits the CL Financial chiefs to promote a version of events that has the blame attached to the Wall Street events of 2007/2008. The people promoting that version are buffoons, whose story is unable to withstand serious examination. I call it the Wall Street hoax and it is useful since it allows the CL Financial chiefs to escape the reality of their failure, to put it charitably, by blaming events way beyond their control.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to be very clear on the scale of this particular lie and the public mischief it represents. Even close examination of CL Financial’s 2007 audited accounts shows only tiny exposures to Wall Street But what is worse is that the entire CL Financial pattern of behaviour and the burning question of the extent to which the CLF chiefs were ‘fit and proper’ are not new issues. If we consider the 15 July 1996 ‘Circular Letter to Shareholders‘ issued by Republic Bank Limited under the hand of then Chairman, the late Frank Barsotti, it is all there. Fifteen years ago we knew the threat to which we were exposing this country by letting CLICO take over Republic Bank…it is 66-pages long, but very important to read – it is on my blog.

We don’t have a Wall Street problem, what we have here is a St. Vincent Street problem. Yes, from the Central Bank (at the foot of the Street) to the Treasury (paying for the whole entire wretched bailout) to the Red House (where the real discussion has never taken place), right up to #29 – the CL Financial headquarters. Yes, is a real St. Vincent Street problem we suffering from. This is we own creation we fighting with.

The CL Financial fiasco is estimated to be costing at least ten times as much, as a proportion of GDP, as the Wall St. crisis. Yet we still have mischief-makers who want to make misleading comparisons between the two, to justify the bailout.

A powerful parallel with the Wall Street crisis is the fact that the CL Financial fiasco was also characterized by ‘Shadow Banking’, meaning vast sums of money solicited from investors and being traded outside of the conventional regulatory umbrella.

Here are some extracts from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s Final Report (the FCIC is the US government’s official Commission of Inquiry into the Wall St crisis) –

From pg. XX (20) of the ‘Conclusions’ section –

“…Within the financial system, the dangers of this debt were magnified because transparency was not required or desired. Massive, short-term borrowing, combined with obligations unseen by others in the market, heightened the chances the system could rapidly unravel. In the early part of the 20th century, we erected a series of protections—the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort, federal deposit insurance, ample regulations—to provide a bulwark against the panics that had regularly plagued America’s banking system in the 19th century. Yet, over the past 30-plus years, we permitted the growth of a shadow banking system—opaque and laden with short-term debt—that rivaled the size of the traditional banking system. Key components of the market—for example, the multitrillion-dollar repo lending market, off-balance-sheet entities, and the use of over-the-counter derivatives—were hidden from view, without the protections we had constructed to prevent financial meltdowns. We had a 21st-century financial system with 19th-century safeguards…”

Every line of that paragraph rings true to our local situation. We are grappling with a shadow banking threat to the savings of the nation. Our national wealth has been pledged to rescue adventurers at the very edge of the financial universe and that is what is wrong with the bailout.

I am no supporter of the Peoples’ Partnership, but what is right is right and the fact is that our Minister of Finance, Dookeran, is spot-on with this part of his analysis and action. When Dookeran spoke in his inaugural budget speech on 8 September 2010, he took the approach of combining the assets and liabilities of both CLICO and British-American Insurance, which showed an insolvency in the order of $7.3Bn.

More to the point, the approach showed ‘traditional insurance‘ liabilities – i.e. Health, Pension and Life – of the order of $6Bn and ‘non-traditional/investment’ liabilities – i.e. EFPAs – of the order of $12Bn.

So what we are seeing is insurance companies whose non-insurance business is twice the size of their insurance portfolio and what is more, the supposedly guaranteed investment is nowhere to be found, hence the tremendous problem in repaying the EFPA holders. That is the dilemma facing the country now and that is what Dookeran was explaining to us – a Shadow Banking arena that has grown to eclipse the core business and threaten the entire nation.

Another important part of the false discourse in all this is the promotion of the utter nonsense that there is any such thing as a ‘Guaranteed Investment’. Absolute and complete lies. There is no such thing and that is the fact. Yet we have had CL Financial’s Boards of Directors of the ‘Great & Good’ promoting that kind of deceptive dangerous nonsense. You Investment Professionals need to find the courage of your convictions to speak-out on this smartman behaviour.

We had a product being promoted as offering twice the market rate of interest and also your entire investment is guaranteed and blah blah blah. The Central Bank and the Supervisor of Insurance sat there and allowed that deceptive advertising to take place and it was a campaign, with thousands of letters. A straightforward assault on good sense and the gatekeepers stood silent.

The final point we need to drive home is that, whatever the temptations, we must not lay the entire blame onto Lawrence Duprey & Andre Monteil. It took plenty more than the main CL Financial chiefs to get us to this point. There is a network of lawyers, accountants, agents who pretended to be financial advisers and of course, the many Board Directors. That network is hundreds of people all of whom share a responsibility, quite probably culpability, for this crisis.

The Colman Commission has to work very hard to preserve its effectiveness.

Colman Commission considerations

This is a rapid look at some of the news coming out of the Colman Commission – the first live evidence was given on Monday 4th July.

That evidence has so far been into the Hindu Credit Union (HCU) and already some peculiar things are emerging. I do not follow it on TV and just read the newspaper reports –

Breach of Trust – It seems clear to me that the depositors had a seriously misplaced faith in HCU and Harry Harnarine, which itself raises certain questions as to who was really fooling who. It is basic and inescapable that a higher rate of return will mean a higher level of risk, which is why it is important to be more sceptical about high-return investments. My point being that as a Credit Union, one has to become a member to participate and therefore one has a stake in the success of the organisation – with access to the accounts and attendance at the AGM, one can only wonder what kind of dance existed between the HCU chiefs and its ordinary members. Yet, we are hearing from people who seem to have deposited their money at these incredible rates of return and adopted attitudes of complete trust. The witnesses need to be more seriously probed on what happened at those AGMs and so on – if they HCU conducted its AGMs anything like the CL Financial’s final AGM, it will be quite a story. We need to get past the various heartbreaking stories, to the nexus of responsibility which is where this entire game is played. I am sure there is plenty more to come out, plenty more.
Farid Scoon

Farid Scoon, Attorney-at-Law – Was expected to explain how he could be representing a group of HCU depositors and the former HCU chief, Harry Harnarine, at the same time.

There also seems to be a strange situation on CL Financial, since I am told that none of the affected people are willing to come forward to testify. I am not very surprised at that and it is yet another indication of the extent of that toxic ‘Code of Silence‘.

What a shame! 25,000 policyholders said to be affected by the failure of CL Financial, yet only one is willing to testify. Only One! I wrote before in this space about the probability that a high proportion of those EFPA monies had never been screened by rigorous Anti Money Laundering (AML) procedures. I suggested to the Minister of Finance that provisions be made in the payout agreements for the applicants for bailout monies to have the source of their funds vetted for compliance with VAT, PAYE, Income and Corporation taxes. The Minister did not adopt those proposals.

So, what we now have is the spectacle of the Colman Commission set up by the government to examine the causes of the collapse and finding that few want to speak, very few. I don’t know if it’s dirty money, or ‘keeping it in the family‘ or what…but I do hope that Colman takes a robust approach by using his powers to sub-poena people to appear and testify.

The Colman Commission needs to deploy more resources in getting info up onto its website in a timely fashion. Just as a simple example, the opening arguments which were heard last week have been posted onto the website in very erratic, delayed fashion. The session of Monday 27th June was posted on Tuesday 28th June, but the sessions of Wednesday 29th and Thursday 30th June were posted on Tuesday 5th July, no explanation given. If more resources are required those need to be deployed. The Colman Commission must not be allowed to become an orphan in our land of grandiose schemes and projects.

Of course we have seen the expected attempts by Lawrence Duprey to remove himself from being enquired into or even being required to answer questions. At this time those attempts appear to have been thwarted, but we can surely expect more spoiling tactics and not just from Duprey, either.

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