Geisha Kow­lessar

Sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers' Union (CWU) Joseph Re­my is call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty to pre­vent the ac­qui­si­tion of Flow by Ca­ble and Wire­less.

Re­my made the call at a press con­fer­ence at the CWU Hall in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, as he made ref­er­ence to a re­cent re­port by the Cari­com Com­pe­ti­tion Com­mis­sion rel­a­tive to the deal, which not­ed that such an ac­qui­si­tion would not be ben­e­fi­cial to the re­gion.The re­port, Re­my added, had al­so launched an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the merg­er.

"The com­mis­sion has de­cid­ed, as pre­lim­i­nary in­ves­ti­ga­tion, that there is enough ev­i­dence to launch an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the ac­qui­si­tion be­cause of the im­pact that it is go­ing to have on the com­pet­i­tive forces in the Caribbean re­gion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the east­ern Caribbean coun­tries," Re­my said.

"We want to make a call to our lo­cal reg­u­la­tors, the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly now that there is a new board...to re­view its per­mis­sion it would have giv­en Ca­ble and Wire­less over sev­er­al months now."He said for the past two to three years CWU has been con­demn­ing the ac­qui­si­tion be­cause it was deemed a con­flict of in­ter­est by the union.

"While T&T may be seen as an area of com­pet­i­tive forces in the wider Caribbean re­gion, we were go­ing to re­turn to a mo­nop­o­lis­tic style of op­er­a­tion," he said.

"What has hap­pened by the com­mis­sion's call vin­di­cat­ed the CWU and we were on tar­get in chal­leng­ing that ac­qui­si­tion. In the face of that in­ves­ti­ga­tion there should not be any reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval for any­thing to do with that ac­qui­si­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it re­lates to the T&T mar­ket."

He al­leged there was a cer­tain in­di­vid­ual who had free reign in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion sec­tor in the re­gion, say­ing there was al­so a "dec­i­ma­tion of the work­force" through­out the east­ern Caribbean.

"What has hap­pened is there has been a mas­sive job cut through­out the re­gion and it has al­so re­turned some of the is­lands to a mo­nop­o­lis­tic style of op­er­a­tion, be­cause what you have now is Ca­ble and Wire­less alone and we are de­mand­ing some sort of in­ter­ven­tion by the re­gion­al gov­ern­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly now, be­cause we are con­vinced there was a bla­tant con­flict of in­ter­est with re­spect to the ac­qui­si­tion," Re­my said.

Say­ing that telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions was crit­i­cal to any coun­try's eco­nom­ic sur­vival, he said it was the nexus of the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and mod­erni­sa­tion of any econ­o­my.Re­my said this coun­try's telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions space must not be ma­nip­u­lat­ed for per­son­al in­ter­est by those who were not re­gion­al peo­ple.

In field­ing ques­tions from the me­dia, Re­my said the ap­proval has not yet been com­plet­ed and main­tained there was room for the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Au­thor­i­ty to re­view the ac­qui­si­tion. He warned that if the trans­ac­tion was to be com­plet­ed the coun­try would have to brace for more job loss­es.

"The so­cial con­scious does not ex­ist with those com­pa­nies. We don't want an­oth­er Arcelor­Mit­tal to resur­face in T&T," Re­my said.He al­so al­leged that multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies had the ca­pac­i­ty to tap in­to da­ta, re­sult­ing in pos­si­ble breach­es in na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

"It is easy to ma­nip­u­late some­thing if you are in to­tal con­trol of it," Re­my added.