Nadaleen Singh

Sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers' Union (CWU) Joseph Re­my is call­ing for TSTT to be list­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change.His sug­ges­tion comes on the heels of a meet­ing of re­gion­al reg­u­la­tors and lead­ers of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies in T&T last week to dis­cuss the pro­posed ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions by Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC).

CWC has 49 per cent share­hold­ing in TSTT and is like­ly to sell those shares if the trans­ac­tion gets the green light, Re­my said yes­ter­day dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at CWU's head­quar­ters in Port-of-Spain.

"We be­lieve that we have ex­am­ples in the Caribbean where ful­ly re­gion­al­ly or lo­cal­ly-owned en­ti­ties have proven to be a suc­cess. While we had is­sues at First Cit­i­zens, it has proven to be a suc­cess­ful fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion and it is whol­ly owned by lo­cals. Why can't the same hap­pen in our telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sec­tor which is so vi­tal to our re­gion­al eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment?"Re­my added that trade unions and cred­it unions will ben­e­fit if TSTT shares are trad­ed on the TTSE.

He said the ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus by CWC is a ma­jor trans­ac­tion and CWU should not be left out of on­go­ing dis­cus­sions."We wrote to the Tele­com Au­thor­i­ty on Au­gust 18, rais­ing our con­cerns about this de­vel­op­ment. A let­ter was ad­dressed to Mr Sel­by Wil­son in his ca­pac­i­ty as chair­man of Tele­com Au­thor­i­ty. Up to this day we haven't even had an ac­knowl­edge­ment or re­ceipt of our cor­re­spon­dence.

"We will con­tin­ue to write them be­cause we be­lieve we are a ma­jor stake­hold­er in this thing be­cause we rep­re­sent the work­ers who work in this in­dus­try. We rep­re­sent the cit­i­zens who don't have a voice."Re­my said there was need for Cari­com lead­ers to in­ter­vene in the trans­ac­tion there were im­pli­ca­tions for the re­gion­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sec­tor.