With all that has been said about the Cli­co bailout, its seems very strange that NOT ONE neg­a­tive com­ment has been made about its Chair­man & CEO by the Gov­ern­ment. At Cli­co, the buck stopped with him. Yet, not a sin­gle state­ment has been is­sued about Mr Duprey al­low­ing the statu­to­ry fund to go in­to such a huge deficit, risk­ing the life sav­ings of thou­sands of peo­ple.

The pol­i­cy­hold­ers have had to en­dure a cam­paign of mis­in­for­ma­tion, in­nu­en­dos, half-truths and out­right lies by those con­cerned, yet it seems that Mr Duprey did noth­ing wrong. The pol­i­cy­hold­ers have been de­monised by the Prime Min­is­ter, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter and one of their Sen­a­tors and up to this point in time a huge cross sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion thinks that a "Cen­tral Bank ap­proved In­sur­ance Prod­uct" was a ponzi scheme.

Re­cent­ly, the Gov­er­nor of the CBTT pub­licly stat­ed that the EF­PA was a bona fide an­nu­ity. Still the dam­age has been done, and the sup­port­ers of this gov­ern­ment con­tin­ue to be­lieve that the pol­i­cy­hold­ers have no rights and should be thank­ful for what they get. One would think that if the Gov­ern­ment did not have to bailout the pol­i­cy­hold­ers, they sim­ply should not have made any of­fer.

Re­sid­ing in the pub­lic do­main present­ly, is a lot of ig­no­rance about this en­tire sit­u­a­tion and I has­ten to add that the Gov­ern­ment is us­ing this ig­no­rance to their ad­van­tage. Af­ter three months of cut­ting the month­ly pen­sion of so many cit­i­zens, "NO GHOSTS ac­counts" have been found and no state­ment about these so called ghost ac­counts was is­sued. In sign­ing the MOU, the Gov­ern­ment has as­sumed con­trol of Cli­co and more im­por­tant­ly the as­sets and li­a­bil­i­ties too.

It sim­ply means that they have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to sat­is­fy the deficit of the statu­to­ry fund, since the CBTT is an in­sti­tu­tion of the State. It would ap­pear to me that the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance is try­ing to mop up ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty in the bank­ing sec­tor by stick­ing to his 20 year bond of­fer.

Sure­ly el­der­ly cit­i­zens would not live 20 years to cash their bonds and would be FORCED to sell these bonds at a huge dis­count to sur­vive un­til their pass­ing. A sec­ondary bond mar­ket would be cre­at­ed and the on­ly group to ben­e­fit would be the banks. Since there is over 4 bil­lion in cash in the sys­tem, this method would be an in­di­rect way of al­low­ing banks to "lend mon­ey" at the pol­i­cy­hold­ers ex­pense.

Most of the pol­i­cy­hold­ers funds col­lec­tive­ly rep­re­sent over 1000 plus years of sav­ings and hard work, yet the min­is­ter of fi­nance is bent on de­stroy­ing these peo­ple's hopes, am­bi­tions and com­fort in their win­ter years. How sad it is for my coun­try when any cit­i­zen is treat­ed so un­fair­ly !

Andy Jangeesingh

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