John Julien, gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU), yes­ter­day called on Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai to launch a foren­sic au­dit in­to the fi­nan­cial op­er­a­tions of TSTT.In a re­sponse to state­ments by act­ing CEO George Hill on the com­pa­ny's lat­est fi­nan­cial re­sults, Julien claimed it was an at­tempt to "cre­ate pan­ic among the per­ma­nent staff to in­fuse fear and have them rush to sign up for their failed VSP of­fer­ing".

He said rev­e­la­tions about TSTT's fi­nan­cial po­si­tions had been made in the midst of un­re­solved wage ne­go­ti­a­tions for the se­nior and ju­nior staff bar­gain­ing units for 2008-2010 and 2011-2013."The mat­ter re­lat­ed to the 2008 to 2010 pe­ri­od was re­ferred to the In­dus­tri­al Court af­ter the com­pa­ny at­tempt­ed to uni­lat­er­al­ly in­ter­fere with and sub­stan­tial­ly re­duce the for­mu­la for cal­cu­lat­ing CO­LA," Julien said.

He said while Hill had re­ferred to costs in­curred on TSTT as a re­sult of an in­dus­tri­al Court rul­ing for 2006 to 2007, this could have been avoid­ed if the com­pa­ny had not uni­lat­er­al­ly re­duced CO­LA pay­ments to ju­nior and se­nior staff. He said the com­pa­ny was made to re­im­burse every work­er af­ter the In­dus­tri­al Court ruled that the Co­la re­duc­tion was wrong.