­­­Mottley appointed to chair UTC

The T&T Unit Trust Corporation (UTC) has appointed former Finance Minister Wendell Mottley as its new Chairman. In a statement yesterday, UTC said the appointment takes effect from January 1, 2013. He will succeed Amoy Chang Fong who served as Chairman from December 2004 to December 2012.

The UTC said: “Mr Mottley brings his vast experience of local and international financial markets to the TTUTC, as the Corporation moves to modernise the Act that governs the Corporation and to meet the challenges of the changing regulatory and business environment.”

The UTC manages over TT$20 billion in assets among its 10 funds and is considered the “leading mutual fund company in T&T.” The UTC said Mottley served as Minister of Finance from 1991 to 1995 and was “most recently based in New York as a Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Credit Suisse, a leading investment banking firm, from which he retired in December, 2011.”

He is a former athlete who participated at the Commonwealth Games and medaling in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and attained Economics degrees from Yale and Cambridge Universities. In his political career, he was leader of the Citizens’ Alliance, which was a dissolved minor political party that received about 5,000 votes and captured no seats in the 2002 General Elections.

He served as Finance Minister in the People's National Movement government between 1991 and 1995 and was in that position when the Trinidad and Tobago dollar was floated in April 1993. Mottley also served on a three-member committee appointed by former finance minister Winston Dookeran in June 2010 to produce an appraisal report on CL Financial and its impact on the local economy. Mottley is a past pupil of the Queen’s Royal College.