Hol­lis John Clifton

With­in hours of an­nounce­ments from Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC) and Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al of the fi­nal­i­sa­tion of their US$3.025 bil­lion merg­er, the most vo­cal crit­ic of the deal, the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union CWU), sent off let­ters call­ing for a deep­er probe of its ap­proval by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (Tatt).The let­ters were ad­dressed to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai and Ken­ny Lue Chee Lip, chair­man of Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Lim­it­ed, and were all signed by CWU sec­re­tary gen­er­al Joseph Re­my.

The union is con­tend­ing that there was a lack of trans­paren­cy in Tatt's ap­proval of the merg­er, re­sult­ing in the na­tion­al pat­ri­mo­ny be­ing sold out "with­out due care and con­sid­er­a­tion."CWU, the ma­jor­i­ty union at TSTT, has asked the prime min­is­ter to do an ur­gent re­view of the ap­proval process and is call­ing for her in­ter­ven­tion to pro­tect the lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­dus­try.

Re­my al­so raised ques­tions about the con­di­tions set out by Tatt for CWC to dis­pose of its 49 per cent share­hold­ing in TSTT. He said there was an ap­par­ent in­fringe­ment of NEL share­hold­ers' rights since no meet­ings were held to dis­cuss the im­pli­ca­tions of that agree­ment, or its im­pact on share­hold­ers' eq­ui­ty in TSTT. In the let­ter to Howai, Re­my claimed the CWC's pres­ence on the TSTT board while the merg­er with Colum­bus was be­ing pur­sued was "con­trary to good and eth­i­cal busi­ness prac­tices."

He said CWC was in­volved in de­vel­op­ment of a strate­gic plan which in­clud­ed the vol­un­tary sep­a­ra­tion of more than 300 se­nior TSTT em­ploy­ees."Our analy­sis of this de­vel­op­ment points to the fact that Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is now poised to re­cruit these em­ploy­ees in the new en­ti­ty that would evolve from this ac­qui­si­tion–em­ploy­ees with in­ti­mate knowl­edge of TSTT's op­er­a­tions and strate­gic di­rec­tion," Re­my said.

He called on Howai, in his ca­pac­i­ty as cor­po­ra­tion sole, to launch an in­ves­ti­ga­tion to de­ter­mine whether Tatt's ap­proval of the merg­er was done in the best in­ter­ests of cit­i­zens of T&T.The union wants to meet with Lue Chee Lip to dis­cuss the fu­ture di­rec­tion of TSTT.