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JOEL JULIEN

A for­mer di­rec­tor of TSTT re­ceived a US$9,000 per diem to at­tend an in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence on be­half of the ma­jor­i­ty State-owned telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny but he did not go.

He left TSTT and nev­er re­turned the mon­ey.

The Emile Elias-chaired TSTT board is now con­sid­er­ing le­gal ac­tion to re­cov­er the funds, the Sun­day Guardian has learned.

Elias de­scribed the ac­tion as "grave mis­con­duct" on the part of the for­mer di­rec­tor.

He con­firmed the sit­u­a­tion dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view on Fri­day as he said that his board was cur­rent­ly ex­am­in­ing all facets of TSTT's op­er­a­tions.

Elias was named as the chair­man of TSTT's board in No­vem­ber last year.

"There has been no au­dit done by the new board of the en­tire or­gan­i­sa­tion. What we are do­ing is ex­am­in­ing all facets of the op­er­a­tions look­ing at how we go in­to the fu­ture with the new strate­gic plan that the board has ap­proved and this would in­clude look­ing at how we can ex­pand rev­enue, re­duce costs in­clud­ing per­son­nel cost and sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­prove the lev­el of ser­vice we give to our cus­tomers," Elias said.

"In that process from time to time we will come across cer­tain things that may have oc­curred in the past and these would be and have been checked in­to and cor­rec­tive ac­tion tak­en," he said.

Elias said one of the things the board was care­ful­ly ex­am­in­ing is the "be­hav­iour" of spe­cif­ic in­di­vid­u­als with re­spect to Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tion's (CWC) de­ci­sion to of­fload its 49 per cent stake in TSTT in or­der to com­ply with con­di­tions placed on its takeover of Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al.

The re­main­ing 51 per cent of TSTT is con­trolled by Gov­ern­ment through its in­vest­ment hold­ing com­pa­ny, Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd (NEL).

"One of the things we ex­am­ined care­ful­ly was the way in which Ca­ble and Wire­less left TSTT and the be­hav­iour of cer­tain per­sons with­in TSTT, NEL and the reg­u­la­tor TATT (Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go) with re­spect of how they ap­par­ent­ly co­op­er­at­ed with CWC in their par­tic­u­lar en­deav­ours," Elias said.

Elias said dur­ing the ex­am­i­na­tion of the com­pa­ny they un­cov­ered the sit­u­a­tion with the for­mer board mem­ber.

"A for­mer di­rec­tor left TSTT ow­ing a sub­stan­tial amount of mon­ey re­ceived for os­ten­si­bly trav­el­ling to some in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence and then did not go and did not re­turn the funds," Elias said.

"As soon as I found out about it I en­sured that he was writ­ten to and giv­en a dead­line to re­turn the funds some US$9,000 and so far he has not re­turned it but has said he would and I have in­struct­ed the cor­po­rate sec­re­tary to pur­sue the mat­ter with great vigour and if he does not re­turn the mon­ey to take such ap­pro­pri­ate le­gal ac­tion as may be re­quired to en­sure the re­turn of these funds to TSTT," he said.

Elias said the di­rec­tor should not have been se­lect­ed to at­tend the in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence in the first place.

"They add no val­ue what­so­ev­er to the com­pa­ny and it was a waste of mon­ey all this trav­el but hav­ing agreed to trav­el, the board hav­ing ap­proved it, this is the last board, but then at the last minute you don't trav­el then you have to re­turn the per diem and you don't and that I con­sid­er to be grave mis­con­duct," Elias said.

Elias dis­missed claims that the dis­rup­tion in ser­vice ex­pe­ri­enced by TSTT over the week­end was an act of sab­o­tage.

"TSTT is con­duct­ing a full and de­tailed root-cause analy­sis, along with its rel­e­vant net­work part­ners to ac­cu­rate­ly de­ter­mine the cause. We are al­so ex­plor­ing what crit­i­cal mea­sures must be put in place to mit­i­gate a sim­i­lar in­ci­dent from be­ing re­peat­ed," a re­lease from the com­pa­ny stat­ed.

"We will be tak­ing cor­rec­tive ac­tion to en­sure there is no re­peat of this event," Elias said.

Last Sun­day, TSTT cus­tomers found them­selves with­out ser­vice to the mo­bile, In­ter­net and land­line ser­vices for most of the day.

TSTT said pre­lim­i­nary in­ves­ti­ga­tions have re­vealed the cause of the black­out to be the fail­ure of equip­ment at the com­pa­ny's St Au­gus­tine, Nel­son and Ch­agua­nas ex­changes.