Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Ger­ry Brooks has been ap­point­ed the chair­man of the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion (UTC). Brooks’ ap­point­ment took ef­fect on March 11 for a term of two years.

He suc­ceeds Rol­ston Nel­son as the cor­po­ra­tion’s chair­man.

Brooks’ ap­point­ment comes less than nine months af­ter he re­signed as the chair­man of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny.

In 2018 the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ St Au­gus­tine cam­pus named Brooks a Pro­fes­sor of Prac­tice-In­no­va­tion and En­tre­pre­neur­ship.

Apart from that Brooks is a re­tired group Chief Op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer at ANSA McAL and a for­mer mem­ber of the board of the Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Lim­it­ed (NEL) and the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT), and an at­tor­ney.

His ap­point­ment as UTC chair­man comes at a time when the cor­po­ra­tion seems to be mak­ing a fi­nan­cial turn­around.

UTC re­port­ed to­tal com­pre­hen­sive in­come for the nine-month pe­ri­od end­ing 30 Sep­tem­ber, 2019 of $81.75 mil­lion.

For the same pe­ri­od in 2018 the UTC record­ed a loss of $6.2 mil­lion. In all the UTC made a loss of $33 mil­lion in 2018.

The Cor­po­ra­tion re­port­ed a $293 mil­lion de­cline in to­tal in­come in 2018 when com­pared to 2017.

UTC’s ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Nigel Ed­wards pre­vi­ous­ly ex­plained to Guardian Me­dia that the re­ver­sal of $88 mil­lion in 2018, when com­pared to 2017, was main­ly as a re­sult of the new ac­count­ing stan­dards that the cor­po­ra­tion had to adopt.