The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers Union yes­ter­day ex­pressed grave con­cern over what the union termed "an ap­par­ent lead­er­ship cri­sis" at ma­jor­i­ty state-owned TSTT. The CWU, which rep­re­sents hun­dreds of work­ers at TSTT said it ques­tioned the "sin­cer­i­ty" of the res­ig­na­tion of Di­an­na De Sousa, who an­nounced last week that she would be re­sign­ing as the com­pa­ny's act­ing CEO at the end of Jan­u­ary.

The union al­so quot­ed from a let­ter from De Sousa pur­port­ed­ly dat­ed De­cem­ber 18, in which the se­nior tele­com ex­ec­u­tive as­sured that she re­mained com­mit­ted to en­gag­ing with the union. The union asked how could some­one who in­tend­ed to re­sign give such an as­sur­ance. The union said that it had been in­formed that Der­rick Jones had been ap­point­ed to act as CEO while De Sousa pro­ceeds on va­ca­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to the CWU, one Al­lan Raghu­nanan has been re­cruit­ed by TSTT to serve as the new vice pres­i­dent of hu­man re­sources, re­plac­ing Edghill Mes­si­ah, who re­signed from the com­pa­ny ef­fec­tive De­cem­ber 31. The union said that it was "sig­nalling our in­ten­tion to chal­lenge" the ap­point­ment of Raghu­nanan as, ac­cord­ing to the CWU, "this de­vel­op­ment has po­lit­i­cal con­no­ta­tions."

The CWU al­so called on the chair­man of TSTT to come clean on the lead­er­ship is­sue at TSTT and com­mu­ni­cate the re­al sit­u­a­tion with re­spect to the com­pa­ny. It al­so said that the mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion was "cre­at­ing an en­vi­ron­ment of un­cer­tain­ty and is de­mo­ti­vat­ing the al­ready di­shev­elled staff.?