CASAN­DRA THOMP­SON�FORBES

Steps are be­ing tak­en to hire for­mer sec­re­tary of Fi­nance and En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, Dr Anselm Lon­don, as a con­sul­tant for new­ly-ap­point­ed sec­re­tary for the di­vi­sion, Joel Jack.The mat­ter was first raised in a To­ba­go news­pa­per where it was re­port­ed the salary of Lon­don as $60,000. This de­ci­sion has since been met with some con­cerns by To­bag­o­ni­ans.

Chief Sec­re­tary of the THA Orville Lon­don is re­port­ed as say­ing that he had no prob­lem pay­ing any salary to any­one once they met the cri­te­ria.He al­so con­firmed that an ex­ec­u­tive note was sent to the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil for ap­proval but was sent back to the Di­vi­sion of Fi­nance for mi­nor al­ter­ations and would again be sent to the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil for con­fir­ma­tion.

How­ev­er, speak­ing at the post-ex­ec­u­tive coun­cil news con­fer­ence on yes­ter­day, Jack said Anslem Lon­don was cho­sen be­cause he is the on­ly per­son with the ex­per­tise in the field in To­ba­go; he al­so ad­mit­ted that the po­si­tion was not ad­ver­tised.

"In To­ba­go at this time there is no pro­fes­sion­al with the tech­ni­cal ca­pac­i­ty and with the in­sti­tu­tion­al knowl­edge of what goes on in the di­vi­sion and the di­vi­sion took the de­ci­sion to re­cruit Dr Lon­don as a se­nior con­sul­tant giv­en his re­la­tion­ship with the di­vi­sion and the in­ti­mate knowl­edge and al­so his tech­ni­cal ca­pac­i­ty so no, it was not ad­ver­tised in that re­gard and as we do it in pro­cure­ment, we ex­er­cised the right of sole se­lec­tive ten­der," Jack said.

Jack said while Anslem Lon­don was the on­ly can­di­date for the po­si­tion, the process was trans­par­ent as they would have sought the bench­mark re­mu­ner­a­tion pack­age for se­nior ex­ec­u­tives in the field, from rep­utable salary as­sess­ment firms through­out T&T in­clud­ing HRC As­so­ciates and CAIRI Con­sul­tants.He said in­for­ma­tion would have come from sev­er­al pri­vate sec­tor en­ti­ties as well as the Cen­tral Bank to de­ter­mine a suit­able re­mu­ner­a­tion pack­age for the se­nior con­sul­tant.

"We re­ceived two rec­om­men­da­tions, the first one sug­gest­ed a month­ly pack­age of $92,000, and the sec­ond pack­age rec­om­mend­ed a flat month­ly fig­ure of $90,000," Jack said."Fol­low­ing our ne­go­ti­a­tions with the ad­min­is­tra­tor and the se­nior con­sul­tant, a fig­ure of $60,000 was agreed up­on, so it is not an ar­bi­trary fig­ure that was pulled out a hat but this was done af­ter care­ful con­sul­ta­tion."

To­bag­o­ni­ans have al­so voiced their opin­ion about the re­ten­tion of for­mer sec­re­tary of tourism and trans­porta­tion Neil Wil­son as a con­sul­tant to cur­rent Sec­re­tary for Tourism Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine.