KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has re­vealed that af­ter a decade and mul­ti­ple as­sess­ments, that the gov­ern­ment’s bailout of CL Fi­nan­cial and CLI­CO has cost tax­pay­ers $30 bil­lion.

Speak­ing at a post Cab­i­net Me­dia Brief­ing, Im­bert said: “Re­mem­ber as well that the gov­ern­ment, tax­pay­ers by ex­ten­sion, bailed out the CL Fi­nan­cial Group and CLI­CO, in the tune of bil­lions of dol­lars - in fact I can tell you now that the fi­nal ac­count in terms of in­debt­ed­ness of CL Fi­nan­cial and CLI­CO to the state is $30 bil­lion.”

Im­bert in­di­cat­ed that it was orig­i­nal­ly thought that the debt would be ap­prox­i­mate­ly $15 bil­lion. He added that when the Min­istry went to court with the liq­ui­da­tion “it was $23 bil­lion+ and hav­ing done, the fi­nal ac­count it is $30 bil­lion.

Im­bert said there are many dif­fer­ent ap­proach­es in the the way in which the debt to tax­pay­ers is be­ing set­tled .

Ac­cord­ing to the Fi­nance Min­is­ter, one of these ap­proach­es is a “set-off”, “in oth­er words you get val­ue for debt”. He gave the ex­am­ple of the gold­en grove es­tate in To­ba­go which was ac­quired for the San­dals ho­tel project. Im­bert said it was val­ued, the es­tate was trans­ferred to the gov­ern­ment and then the debt was re­duced by the val­ued amount.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter said that a sim­i­lar process oc­curred with CL Ma­rine. While he did not have the ex­act fig­ure, Im­bert dis­closed that with re­gard to CL Ma­rine, the com­pa­ny and it’s as­sets were val­ued at ‘a bit over $100 mil­lion’.

He said that this ac­qui­si­tion has now re­duced the li­a­bil­i­ty of CL Fi­nan­cial/ CLI­CO Group to the gov­ern­ment as re­sult of ac­quir­ing that prop­er­ty.

The dis­clo­sure of the val­u­a­tion comes af­ter the Min­istry of Fi­nance is­sued a press re­lease, as­sert­ing the fact that CL Ma­rine and its sub­sidiaries have been ac­quired by the gov­ern­ment, which was part of a court su­per­vised liq­ui­da­tion process.

Based on the liq­ui­da­tion, Im­bert said that the gov­ern­ment was go­ing through the process of “ac­quir­ing strate­gic as­sets and net­ting off/set­ting off the val­ue of CL Fi­nan­cial Group as­sets against the debt owed,” thus re­duc­ing the debt ac­cord­ing­ly.

The Min­is­ter in­sist­ed that these de­tails were in­clud­ed the re­cent­ly pub­lished press re­lease, but they were not. Hence the rea­son for­mer Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance and new­ly ap­point­ed CEO of the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School Mar­i­ano Browne asked: “Where is the re­port from the Court?”

The Min­istry of Fi­nance, in the re­lease, not­ed that the gov­ern­ment has cre­at­ed the Na­tion­al Ma­rine and Main­te­nance Ser­vices Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, a new whol­ly owned State en­ter­prise for the afore­men­tioned pur­pose.

Hav­ing com­plet­ed the ac­qui­si­tion, the Fi­nance min­istry dis­closed that the Gov­ern­ment “re­cent­ly ap­point­ed an in­ter­im Board of Di­rec­tors, pend­ing a per­ma­nent board, com­prised of se­nior pub­lic of­fi­cials, with an im­me­di­ate man­date to im­ple­ment a prop­er gov­er­nance struc­ture ac­cord­ing to the Com­pa­nies Act and the State En­ter­prise Per­for­mance Mon­i­tor­ing Man­u­al.”

The Min­is­ter of Fi­nance went on to say that the gov­ern­ment is quite en­thused about this par­tic­u­lar ac­qui­si­tion “be­cause we have to di­ver­si­fy away from oil and gas and ship re­pair, ship build­ing and so on, is a ma­jor area of gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy, has been for may many years.”

Im­bert em­pha­sized that ship build­ing and ship is al­so a ma­jor area of di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion. He re­marked that the gov­ern­ment is in the process of ac­quir­ing brand new ves­sels - two fast fer­ries and two mil­i­tary ves­sels com­ing from Aus­tralia.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter al­so re­mind­ed the pub­lic about the Galleons pas­sage, not­ing that the fa­cil­i­ties of CL Ma­rine and its as­sets which are housed in Ch­aguara­mas, is in­tend­ed to re­pair the afore­men­tioned ves­sels.

“So it serves a mul­ti­ple of pur­pos­es, it’s part of our di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ef­fort and it is al­so a very ef­fi­cient means of re­pair­ing the gov­ern­ment ves­sels,” said Im­bert.

As a re­sult of this, the fi­nance min­ster said he was ex­pect­ing the gov­ern­ment to re­ceive salu­ta­tions and con­grat­u­la­tions for start­ing the first ma­jor di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion project of the gov­ern­ment, “rather than be­ing sub­ject­ed to all sorts of ques­tions about, Why we do that? How you do that? How much you pay for it et cetera?”