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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

BG View

Who controls Clico and to what end?

by

20140522

On Mon­day, the Cen­tral Bank is­sued an ex­tra­or­di­nary press re­lease in which it pur­port­ed that it "is in con­trol of Cli­co, pur­suant to Sec­tion 44D of the Cen­tral Bank Act" and that it "is the on­ly en­ti­ty em­pow­ered to re­struc­ture the busi­ness or un­der­tak­ings of Cli­co."

The state­ment from the Cen­tral Bank was ex­tra­or­di­nary for sev­er­al rea­sons, the first be­ing that the Gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank ob­vi­ous­ly thought this re­lease was im­por­tant enough that he need­ed to ap­pend his sig­na­ture and his job ti­tle to the bot­tom of it.

This is out of the or­di­nary be­cause the Cen­tral Bank is­sued re­leas­es on May 9 (on the avail­abil­i­ty of for­eign ex­change), March 13 (on fraud­u­lent text mes­sages) and on April 12 (on Dr Alvin Hi­laire's ap­point­ment as deputy gov­er­nor) with­out the Gov­er­nor think­ing it nec­es­sary to in­form the pop­u­la­tion that this was a pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion that came from him.

The sec­ond rea­son Gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­bar­ran's state­ment was ex­tra­or­di­nary was be­cause he made it clear he was re­spond­ing to re­ports made in the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian on May 18, 2014. The nam­ing of the source of the in­for­ma­tion to which a re­sponse was giv­en, while per­fect­ly ac­cept­able in terms of pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion by an im­por­tant in­sti­tu­tion, is some­thing that pre­vi­ous Cen­tral Bank gov­er­nors have avoid­ed, for ob­vi­ous rea­sons.

The third rea­son Gov­er­nor Ram­bar­ran's state­ment was out of the or­di­nary was that it was made in re­sponse (or it could be per­ceived to have been made in re­sponse) to com­ments made by the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Lar­ry Howai, that were re­port­ed in the last Sun­day BG.

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