Af­ter six months, top in­vest­ment banker Steve Bideshi is leav­ing his job as the in­ter­im CEO of state-con­trolled CL Fi­nan­cial af­ter the Gov­ern­ment failed to come to terms with him with re­gard to a three-year com­pen­sa­tion pack­age. In a state­ment yes­ter­day, CL Fi­nan­cial chair­man Shafeek Sul­tan-Khan an­nounced that Bideshi was leav­ing the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion on Jan­u­ary 31 af­ter he "com­plet­ed his oblig­a­tions as as the in­ter­im CEO of CL Fi­nan­cial." The state­ment in­di­cat­ed that Bideshi was "re­turn­ing to the pur­suit of his oth­er busi­ness in­ter­ests," al­though the banker left the top job at Citibank in Turkey in Ju­ly last year to join CL Fi­nan­cial.

Be­fore leav­ing for Turkey, where he lived and worked from 2004 to 2009, Bideshi served as Citibank's T&T coun­try head from Oc­to­ber 17, 1995, to Au­gust 1, 2004. The Guardian un­der­stands that at the heart of Bideshi's de­ci­sion to leave the CL Fi­nan­cial or­gan­i­sa­tion af­ter six months was a grow­ing dis­en­chant­ment over what he saw as the foot-drag­ging by the Gov­ern­ment over fi­nal­i­sa­tion of the terms and con­di­tions of his con­tract. There was al­so some dis­agree­ment with the com­pen­sa­tion pack­age, al­though sources close to him in­sist­ed he was not leav­ing be­cause of the mon­ey. Sources said that Bideshi agreed to leave his job in Turkey based on a let­ter of em­ploy­ment as the in­ter­im CEO of CL Fi­nan­cial for six months dur­ing which time it was ex­pect­ed that the terms and con­di­tions for the bal­ance of the three years would have been worked out.

The three-year time frame was based on the fact that the Gov­ern­ment signed a three-year agree­ment on June 12 with ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er and for­mer CL Fi­nan­cial chair­man, Lawrence Duprey, aimed at re­struc­tur­ing the con­glom­er­ate by dis­pos­ing its as­sets and length­en­ing the ma­tu­ri­ty pro­file of its debt, which is es­ti­mat­ed to be over US$2 bil­lion. The job of re­struc­tur­ing CL Fi­nan­cial is a huge one as its last au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ment, which was for the 2007 fi­nan­cial year, put its as­sets at $100 bil­lion with op­er­a­tions in 32 coun­tries and an in­ter­est in over 70 com­pa­nies.