BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos–The High Court is hear­ing ar­gu­ments re­lat­ing to the Bar­ba­dos gov­ern­ment's res­cue plan for the cash-strapped Cli­co In­ter­na­tion­al Life In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny.When the mat­ter be­gan on Tues­day, at­tor­neys rep­re­sent­ing lo­cal and East­ern Caribbean pol­i­cy­hold­ers de­scribed the Fre­un­del Stu­art ad­min­is­tra­tion's pro­pos­al as dis­crim­i­na­to­ry, un­law­ful and un­fair.

Pol­i­cy hold­ers in the East­ern Caribbean as well as a num­ber of cor­po­rate pol­i­cy­hold­ers have ob­ject­ed to the Fre­un­del pro­pos­al to take over the col­lapsed in­sur­ance com­pa­ny.The ju­di­cial man­ag­er, rep­re­sent­ed by De­loitte Con­sult­ing, has tak­en liq­ui­da­tion off the ta­ble and has sup­port­ed Gov­ern­ment's scheme.

Gov­ern­ment has al­ready ap­point­ed a board of di­rec­tors to a new Bar­ba­dos com­pa­ny which it pro­posed would take over the op­er­a­tions of the in­sur­ance firm and would pur­port­ed­ly look af­ter the in­ter­est of lo­cal pol­i­cy­hold­ers.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Chris Sinck­ler had dis­closed dur­ing his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion in June that the new com­pa­ny, New Life In­vest­ment Com­pa­ny Inc (NCLI­CO), would present fresh af­fi­davits to the court to avoid liq­ui­da­tion.

But promi­nent Bar­ba­di­an Queen's Coun­sel Sir Richard Chel­tenham, rep­re­sent­ing pol­i­cy­hold­ers in EC­CU and at­tor­neys-at-law ap­pear­ing for cor­po­rate pol­i­cy­hold­ers and the in­di­vid­u­als from the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty blast­ed the ini­tia­tive in its present form.

Caribbean pol­i­cy hold­ers have been seek­ing com­pen­sa­tion af­ter the Trinidad-based in­sur­ance gi­ant, Colo­nial Life In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny (CLI­CO) an­nounced in 2009 that it had en­tered in­to a multi­bil­lion dol­lar agree­ment with the T&T gov­ern­ment to bail out of the cash strapped com­pa­ny.

CMC