PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

De­spite promis­ing 2023 and first quar­ter 2024 re­sults, the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTC) Act be­came a ma­jor talk­ing point as the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion host­ed its an­nu­al meet­ing at the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Au­di­to­ri­um yes­ter­day.

UTC ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor, Nigel Ed­wards, was ques­tioned about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of amend­ing the act by In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Hazel Thomp­son-Ahye, who ex­pressed frus­tra­tion that it pre­vent­ed lawyers from ob­tain­ing key in­for­ma­tion con­cern­ing their clients’ es­tate in civ­il mat­ters.

“I speak on my be­half and on be­half of a num­ber of lawyers who are dis­sat­is­fied with the UTC Act sec­tion 40 (1) and (2), which pre­cludes staff of Unit Trust from re­veal­ing to a lawyer in­for­ma­tion about a unithold­er’s sta­tus. For ex­am­ple, if you are a lawyer, and you’re ap­ply­ing for an es­tate, and you don’t know how many units the de­ceased had, the Unit Trust can­not tell you un­less that in­for­ma­tion has come on­ly to a nom­i­nee. If the nom­i­nee has died, as in a case that I had, or there is no nom­i­nee you can­not get that in­for­ma­tion,” said the In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor, who had pre­vi­ous­ly raised her con­cerns about the UTC Act in the Sen­ate.

She added, in oth­er cas­es the Act al­so pre­vent­ed ac­cess to such in­for­ma­tion even in the case of unithold­ers suf­fer­ing from men­tal health is­sues, which she said was not the case for oth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in­clud­ing cred­it unions.

In re­sponse to the sen­a­tor’s ques­tions and points, Ed­wards ex­plained the board did not have con­trol over amend­ments to the act, al­though it could make rec­om­men­da­tions or sug­ges­tions for changes to be made.

In an in­ter­view with jour­nal­ists af­ter the an­nu­al meet­ing, Ed­wards con­firmed there were changes to the act that had been sug­gest­ed by the board.

“We con­tin­ue to make rep­re­sen­ta­tions to have some of the as­pects of the UTC Act amend­ed. Of course, as I am sure you un­der­stand, the par­lia­men­tary agen­da is not con­trolled by us and, sec­ond­ly, it is a very tight agen­da. So some of the things that we would like to see changed in the act have to do with how we are reg­u­lat­ed and how we deal with the reg­u­la­tors. We have made rec­om­men­da­tions for a num­ber of those changes. And we an­tic­i­pate in due course, we will re­ceive some move­ment from the Min­istry of Fi­nance that those changes will go to Par­lia­ment,” said Ed­wards.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, Ed­wards con­firmed that the UTC’s quar­ter one re­sults con­tin­ued the trend of im­prove­ment seen in 2023.

“Our unithold­ers ben­e­fit­ted from a to­tal of $322 mil­lion in div­i­dend pay­outs, which was an in­crease of 19 per cent over that paid in 2022. In 2024, we have con­tin­ued the trend for the first quar­ter; our dis­tri­b­u­tion to unithold­ers in­creased by 44 per cent from $59 mil­lion in Q1 2023 to $85 mil­lion in Q1 of 2024,” said Ed­wards.

Chief in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer, Nicholas Nan­ton, al­so con­firmed that the UTC app, which had been an­nounced last year, was in the be­ta test­ing stage and is ex­pect­ed to be func­tion­al soon. Ed­wards con­ser­v­a­tive­ly said the app should go live in two months.