Raphael John-Lall

Min­is­ter of Trade, In­dus­try and In­vest­ment Vas­ant Bharath said yes­ter­day that the merg­er of Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) and Air Ja­maica has not worked out the way it was planned.

"The in­ten­tion was to have a Caribbean air­line and the merg­ing of Air Ja­maica and Caribbean Air­lines was sup­posed to pro­vide that. There was a stip­u­la­tion by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) that Ja­maica would di­vest it­self of Air Ja­maica and that is how CAL and the Gov­ern­ment of T&T stepped in.

Clear­ly it has not worked as it was in­tend­ed to work be­cause of the in­ter­ven­tion of low cost car­ri­ers like Delta, West Jet, Jet Blue, which have come in­to the mar­ket place and usurped a lot of the traf­fic from those routes," said Bharath, who is al­so Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance.

Bharath spoke to the me­dia yes­ter­day af­ter the Caribbean In­vest­ment Fo­rum (CIF) launch at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.He al­so said this is not the first time St Vin­cent Prime Min­is­ter Ralph Gon­salves has raised the is­sue of T&T's Gov­ern­ment's sub­sidy to CAL.

"It is not the first time he has raised it and it will be pre­ma­ture for me to make any an­nounce­ment on it. The fact is when CAL was ini­tial­ly set up there was a grace pe­ri­od of five to six years when the air­line dur­ing its re­struc­tur­ing would be giv­en a sub­sidised avi­a­tion fu­el price un­til it at­tained op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cies. We have con­sul­tants com­ing from abroad to look at the op­er­a­tion," he said.

Gon­salves plans to dis­cuss the is­sue with Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar when he comes to T&T lat­er this month for a meet­ing of re­gion­al lead­ers.Bharath said he has al­ready writ­ten to Ja­maican Trans­port Min­is­ter Dr Omar Davies with re­gard to is­sues of the CAL and Air Ja­maica and will be lead­ing a del­e­ga­tion there in June.

"The board did make a pre­sen­ta­tion to Fi­nance Min­is­ter Howai and I last week in the per­sons of the deputy chair­man and the act­ing CEO Robert Cor­bie. It was pri­mar­i­ly about what they in­tend to do over the next 24 months but al­so to ex­plain in more de­tail the ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion of the Ja­maican routes. The fre­quen­cy of those routes have been re­duced by 50 per cent," he said.

When asked by re­porters if "heads will roll" over pos­si­ble mis­man­age­ment at CAL, he said he is not in a po­si­tion to com­ment ."I can not say that for the mo­ment as we have not re­ceived fi­nal re­ports on these is­sues and many of them are still on­go­ing. Many of them are just al­le­ga­tions in the press so we do not know for sure as yet," he said.When ques­tioned about if any­thing has been done about "free rides" giv­en to friends of CAL's man­age­ment, he al­so de­clined to com­ment.

"It would be pre­ma­ture to say that, I do not know if that was ac­tu­al­ly the case in the first in­stance. It is just a news­pa­per re­port and the Min­istry of Fi­nance is in­ves­ti­gat­ing it,|" he said.De­spite CAL's cur­rent sit­u­a­tion he is op­ti­mistic that the trou­bled air­line would break even by 2014."The im­pres­sion I have that I have got from the chair­man is that by the end of 2014 CAL should be break­ing even."