The Massy group is one of the largest com­pa­nies of its kind in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, em­ploy­ing 13,000 peo­ple through­out the re­gion, in South Amer­i­ca and in the US.

In its fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2023, the group gen­er­at­ed rev­enue of US$2.09 bil­lion and earned US$115.5 mil­lion in af­ter-tax prof­it from con­tin­u­ing op­er­a­tions, an in­crease of 21.6 per cent over its 2022 per­for­mance.

What’s more, the Massy group is ex­pand­ing by ac­qui­si­tion, hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly closed three ma­te­r­i­al pur­chas­es in its 2023 fi­nan­cial year; these are Rowe’s IGA Su­per­mar­kets, an in­de­pen­dent su­per­mar­ket chain of sev­en stores in Jack­sonville, Flori­da; Air Liq­uide T&T Ltd, a man­u­fac­tur­er and sup­pli­er of in­dus­tri­al and med­ical gas­es in T&T; and IGL (St Lu­cia) Ltd, the par­ent com­pa­ny of a dis­trib­u­tor of LPG and man­u­fac­tur­er and dis­trib­u­tor of in­dus­tri­al and med­ical gas­es in Ja­maica.

Massy spent a to­tal of US$240.5 mil­lion on these ac­qui­si­tions.

Be­fore the ac­qui­si­tions in the 2023 fi­nan­cial year, Massy gen­er­at­ed a sig­nif­i­cant war chest of US dol­lars by di­vest­ing non-core as­sets over the pe­ri­od 2019 to 2022.

The sale of its non-core as­sets has not on­ly gen­er­at­ed for­eign ex­change for Massy, it has al­so al­lowed the group to fo­cus on its three core port­fo­lios, which are in­te­grat­ed re­tail, gas prod­ucts and mo­tors and ma­chines.

It is not a co­in­ci­dence that two of the three ac­qui­si­tions in the 2023 fi­nan­cial year were in its gas port­fo­lio, which the com­pa­ny ob­vi­ous­ly views as a growth pole af­ter the syn­er­gies have been ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed.

As a com­pa­ny, Massy is ac­tu­al­is­ing what the T&T Gov­ern­ment should be do­ing, which is di­vest­ing as­sets in or­der to fund the ac­qui­si­tion of new as­sets and cre­at­ing in­de­pen­dent gov­er­nance teams to man­age the new port­fo­lios.

In an­oth­er sign that the com­pa­ny is seek­ing to ex­pand, the Massy Group al­so cross-list­ed the com­pa­ny’s shares on the Ja­maica Stock Ex­change in Jan­u­ary 2022, mak­ing the com­pa­ny’s shares avail­able on a stock mar­ket that is re­put­ed to fa­cil­i­tate greater liq­uid­i­ty than the T&T Stock Ex­change, with the added ben­e­fit of much eas­i­er con­ver­sion to US dol­lars.

While it is clear that Massy is do­ing a great deal that is laud­able, Mon­day’s an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing (AGM) of the group has the po­ten­tial to take some of the shine off the 100-year-old com­pa­ny, which is clear­ly seek­ing to rein­vent it­self.

At the AGM, An­gelique Parisot-Pot­ter, Massy group gen­er­al coun­sel and ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent re­spon­si­ble for busi­ness in­tegri­ty, read from a pre­pared text, out­lin­ing “sig­nif­i­cant gov­er­nance and fidu­cia­ry con­cerns.”

As a share­hold­er of the com­pa­ny, Ms Parisot-Pot­ter is en­ti­tled to raise con­cerns at AGM.

As the se­nior ex­ec­u­tive at the group in charge of busi­ness in­tegri­ty, it is her re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to stand in the shoes of share­hold­ers in the pro­tec­tion of the com­pa­ny against wastage of scarce for­eign ex­change and in­ap­pro­pri­ate pro­cure­ment prac­tices.

On the oth­er hand, the Massy board has tak­en the po­si­tion that her state­ment at the AGM, which fol­lowed her sub­mis­sion of a 13-page doc­u­ment of al­le­ga­tions and con­cerns to the group CEO, con­sti­tutes “pub­lic dis­clo­sure of a mat­ter con­fi­den­tial to the board.” Ms Parisot-Pot­ter was sent on ad­min­is­tra­tive leave yes­ter­day un­til Jan­u­ary 12.

We urge the Massy board to live up to its stat­ed com­mit­ment to ini­ti­ate an in­de­pen­dent process to look in­to each of Ms Parisot-Pot­ter’s al­le­ga­tions. The com­pa­ny’s board must al­so be mind­ful of due process in its de­ter­mi­na­tion of whether she breached ex­pect­ed con­fi­den­tial­i­ty.

On both is­sues, it is not far-fetched to imag­ine that the eyes of cor­po­rate Caribbean, and be­yond, are on Massy.