Massy Holdings’ president and CEO Gervase Warner opted to proceed on early retirement because he felt his continued presence at the top of one of the country’s largest companies was creating a distraction, a source close to the company told Guardian Media yesterday.
Massy announced in a newspaper advertisement yesterday that Warner would retire from the company and its board on April 6, 2024, his 59th birthday. Massy’s retirement age is 60. Warner is to be replaced as president and CEO of Massy by David Affonso, the executive chairman of the group’s integrated retail portfolio.
Both Warner and Affonso are 58 years old.
Warner’s early retirement from the company he has led for 14 years caused speculation about his motives throughout the region, from Jamaica to Guyana.
“I have a sense that Mr Warner decided to step aside to allow the company to continue to thrive without him, as he may have felt that his presence may have been a distraction,” said the source, who declined to be identified, because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Warner communicated his decision to retire early at a Massy board meeting on Wednesday, company sources confirmed.
The source close to Massy said the “tremendous value that Gervase Warner brought to the company over his tenure was recognised, including his role in focusing the group on its three portfolios and the disposal of non-core assets.”
As at September 30, 2023, Warner owned 24,994,769 Massy shares, which were worth $109.97 million yesterday.
The news of Warner’s early retirement comes amid an investigation being conducted by senior counsel Kerwyn Garcia, into allegations made by Massy’s former executive director of business integrity and group general counsel, Angelique Parisot-Potter, at the group’s 100th annual meeting at Hilton Trinidad on December 18.
At the meeting Parisot-Potter referred to an executive leadership programme, comprising “bizarre rituals” including that the consultants can train Massy employees to communicate with the dead and that attendees can self heal with ‘white light energy’.
“This is a matter of grave concern to shareholders because the couple leading this programme appear to exert disproportionate influence over our executive team,” Parisot-Potter told Massy shareholders at the meeting.
Neither Warner nor the company’s chairman Robert Riley responded to the questions from Guardian Media.
Contacted for comment yesterday, Parisot-Potter said: “The company would be aware that Warner is one of the named parties in my submission and that whether present or absent, he has information that would be material to the investigation.”
“With regard to Mr Warner’s decision to leave the company more than a year away from his scheduled retirement date, that is a matter that is up for public opinion,” she said.
She said while she agreed to be a party to the Garcia investigation, she has not been advised of the status of the investigation.
“Given the chairman’s reply to my statement at the annual meeting on December 18, 2023, that the investigation had commenced, and given the statement by the company by way of letter to me a month later on January 18, 2024 advising that the investigation would take six weeks, I concluded that the investigation would have been completed on or before January 29, 2024 being six weeks from the date of the annual meeting and two months since the date I submitted the memo.
“Unfortunately, I have not as yet been advised on the status of the investigation. This is consistent with the lack of respect with which I have been treated for the duration of this entire matter,” she said.