For­mer chair­man of Unilever Caribbean Ltd, Gary Voss, said the mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion of the com­pa­ny plunged by $1.4 bil­lion be­tween 2015 and 2023.

Speak­ing at Unilever’s an­nu­al meet­ing at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Voss blamed the British multi­na­tion­al con­sumer goods com­pa­ny for the de­cline in share­hold­er val­ue.

Pref­ac­ing his com­ments by say­ing he had “some very se­ri­ous ques­tions” about Unilever’s 2022 ac­counts and the per­for­mance of the com­pa­ny, Voss said: “In 2015, the mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion of this com­pa­ny was $1.8 bil­lion. The share price then was $68. The share price now is about $15. The mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion of the com­pa­ny is now $400 mil­lion. So the val­ue that has been de­stroyed un­der the watch of this board is $1.4 bil­lion.”

Unilever an­nounced the re­tire­ment of Voss as chair­man of the board of Unilever Caribbean Lim­it­ed ef­fec­tive May 21, 2015.

He said half of the loss in mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion, some $700 mil­lion, was ab­sorbed by Unilever, which Voss said had brought the loss on it­self.

“But $700 mil­lion has been lost by the peo­ple sit­ting in this room,” he point­ed out.

Voss ques­tioned how the val­ue of the com­pa­ny man­aged to fall by so much in eight years.

He al­so ques­tioned the in­de­pen­dence of the cur­rent Unilever Caribbean board, say­ing that the multi­na­tion­al com­pa­ny had placed a ma­jor­i­ty of its di­rec­tors on the board.

Stress­ing on the com­pa­ny’s cor­po­rate gov­er­nance, which he said Unilever claims to be a cham­pi­on of, Voss ques­tioned whether its em­ploy­ees or share­hold­ers were con­sult­ed about the de­ci­sion to re­shape the firm en­tire­ly by end­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing in T&T.

“Unilever has run roughshod over the rest. They have in fact hi­jacked this com­pa­ny. They have hi­jacked the com­pa­ny with­out any ref­er­ence to any­body else and they have de­stroyed $1.4 bil­lion worth of val­ue,” Voss said, adding that Unilever was once a fine ex­am­ple of a pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­ny in this coun­try.

“It was re­spect­ed. It was seen as a well-run com­pa­ny, do­ing the right things with qual­i­ty brands and with mo­ti­vat­ed em­ploy­ees.”

Speak­ing ear­li­er in the meet­ing, the cur­rent Unilever Caribbean chair­man, Igna­cio Segares, ex­plained why the com­pa­ny had de­cid­ed to stop man­u­fac­tur­ing at its long-time Champ Fleurs lo­ca­tion last year.

He said the com­pa­ny’s glob­al fo­cus is to bring its brands to its cus­tomers, which it has been do­ing for the last 95 years here.

“Now, in or­der to do that, at one mo­ment in time, the de­ci­sion was made to man­u­fac­ture here and for many years we did that. But the core busi­ness is to sell those brands to con­sumers. Things have all been changed and there came a point when man­u­fac­tur­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go was no longer com­pet­i­tive, due to some changes in the glob­al econ­o­my,” said Segares.

He cit­ed as an ex­am­ple the fact that laun­dry pow­er can be or­dered on the in­ter­net and im­port­ed in­to T&T at a price that is com­pet­i­tive to the Unilever brands.

“The de­ci­sion to stop man­u­fac­tur­ing in T&T is ba­si­cal­ly to re­main com­pet­i­tive be­cause the con­sumers want good prod­ucts, but pric­ing is al­so key,” he said.

Head­quar­tered in Lon­don, Eng­land, Unilever prod­ucts in­clude food, condi­ments, bot­tled wa­ter, ba­by food, soft drink, ice cream and in­stant cof­fee as well as laun­dry and per­son­al care prod­ucts.