Gail Alexan­der

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Gov­ern­ment is be­ing asked to pay up US$60 mil­lion owed on Cli­co li­a­bil­i­ty or risk pos­si­bly be­ing sued by Cari­com coun­ter­part An­tigua.

An­tigua Prime Min­is­ter Gas­ton Browne yes­ter­day called on T&T to pay up the sum as he not­ed a third let­ter on the is­sue will soon be sent to the T&T Gov­ern­ment.

How­ev­er, if T&T con­tin­ues to treat the mat­ter with con­tempt “then we’ll have no choice but to sue them,” Browne said.

He not­ed that T&T’s Gov­ern­ment has been writ­ten to on the is­sue be­fore and did not get a prop­er re­sponse.

Browne spoke about the mat­ter on An­tigua’s Pointe FM’s “Browne and Browne” ra­dio show on Sat­ur­day and the sto­ry be­gan cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day.

Browne has been chair­man of the sub-com­mit­tee on in­sur­ance with­in the Cari­com union since about a year ago. He said sig­nif­i­cant progress was made on the Cli­co-British Amer­i­can In­sur­ance com­pa­ny (Baico) is­sue.

Bar­ba­dos’ gov­ern­ment agreed to pay US$37m for the as­sets of Cli­co In­ter­na­tion­al in Bar­ba­dos. For Baico, some $9.3 mil­lion will come from St Kitts for the Nevis Is­land ad­min­is­tra­tion bond and $8.2m will be col­lect­ed from St Lu­cia’s pledged as­sets.

The sale of re­al es­tate as­sets to the var­i­ous ter­ri­to­ries was agreed and it was even sug­gest­ed the gov­ern­ments could buy them if they need them, he added.

Browne said lit­i­ga­tion is al­so be­ing pur­sued against Cli­co founder Lawrence Duprey and com­pa­ny and “pos­si­bly, we may even­tu­al­ly have to sue the Gov­ern­ment of T&T be­cause as you know, they had agreed to pro­vide a set­tle­ment of US$100 mil­lion and they paid about close to US$40 mil­lion and the bal­ance of US$60 mil­lion re­mains un­paid.”

“We have writ­ten to the Gov­ern­ment of T&T and they have not even treat­ed us with the type of re­spect that is typ­i­cal among coun­tries and col­leagues,” Browne said.

“So, we’ll be writ­ing to them again, it’s prob­a­bly gonna be the third time and we hope that now their for­tunes have im­proved, that they are ben­e­fit­ting from the in­crease in the es­ca­la­tion of fu­el prices, that they’ll put some sys­tem in place to cov­er the rest of the li­a­bil­i­ty. If they con­tin­ue to treat us with con­tempt, then we’ll have no choice but to sue them.”

The T&T Gov­ern­ment un­der­took a bailout of Cli­co af­ter it col­lapsed in 2009 and it still work­ing to re­cov­er that debt owed to it, es­ti­mat­ed last year at $1.2 bil­lion, via var­i­ous arrange­ments, in­clud­ing the sale of Cli­co as­sets.

T&T Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials were tight-lipped on the mat­ter yes­ter­day.