Although Ca­roni (1975) Lim­it­ed ceased op­er­a­tions 16 years ago, the full clo­sure of the com­pa­ny is stalled be­cause of court mat­ters in­volv­ing res­i­den­tial lots and bun­ga­lows. This was con­firmed by board chair­man Jer­ry Hospedales yes­ter­day when he ap­peared be­fore Par­lia­ment’s Pub­lic Ac­counts En­ter­pris­es Com­mit­tee (PAEC) as it ex­am­ined the com­pa­ny’s ac­counts for 2010 to 2018.

Hospedales said the Ca­roni clo­sure since 2003 had cost T&T ap­prox­i­mate­ly $10 bil­lion, with a large chunk of costs con­nect­ed to the de­vel­op­ment of agri­cul­tur­al and res­i­den­tial lots for for­mer work­ers, plus costs for train­ing and oth­er is­sues aris­ing from Vol­un­tary Sep­a­ra­tion of Em­ploy­ment Pack­age (VSEP) arrange­ments.

“From a fi­nan­cial per­spec­tive, I think (for­mer work­ers) were fair­ly treat­ed,” he said.

While 6,005 for­mer work­ers have re­ceived agri­cul­tur­al lots, Hospedales said, 1,200 work­ers have not yet come for­ward, de­spite ex­ten­sive ad­ver­tis­ing, to get lots.

He al­so said 7,542 res­i­den­tial lots had been de­liv­ered to for­mer work­ers, but the de­liv­ery of 4,351 lots had been de­layed due to lit­i­ga­tion in­volv­ing the Es­tate Man­age­ment Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (EM­B­DC) which is han­dling lot de­vel­op­ment.

The oth­er court mat­ter in­volves some of the 224 Ca­roni bun­ga­lows. Em­ploy­ees were al­lowed to buy the hous­es, val­ued be­tween $400,000 and $1.5 mil­lion, with a dis­count based on their length of ser­vice. For ex­am­ple, work­ers with 20 years’ ser­vice could get a 20 per cent dis­count. How­ev­er, some work­ers chal­lenged the pric­ing for­mu­la in court and their union said that was not what they had con­tem­plat­ed.

About 142 of the bun­ga­lows are still oc­cu­pied by work­ers and oth­ers by ten­ants and state agen­cies. The com­pa­ny is pay­ing for the elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply.

Hospedales said no one “was tak­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty” for the bun­ga­lows and he would like to see them shift­ed to Gov­ern­ment and the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion even­tu­al­ly.

Be­cause of the on­go­ing court mat­ters, Hospedales was un­able to say ex­act­ly when Ca­roni (1975) Lim­it­ed would be liq­ui­dat­ed. The mat­ter was be­ing ad­dressed “five or six years ago,” he said and he could on­ly say that by year-end the board would eval­u­ate the sit­u­a­tion and give Gov­ern­ment op­tions to de­ter­mine if Ca­roni can fi­nal­ly en­ter liq­ui­da­tion and shift re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to some oth­er state agency.

Hospedales said a “great deal” still had to be done re­gard­ing res­i­den­tial lots, bun­ga­lows and oth­er mat­ters

To date, he said, there were about 10,000 Ca­roni pen­sion­ers with a min­i­mum pen­sion of $650 month­ly.

The Gov­ern­ment is fund­ing the pen­sion to a to­tal of $369 mil­lion. Work is on­go­ing to have pen­sion­ers deal di­rect­ly with Guardian Life and Cli­co rather than Ca­roni’s Cou­va of­fice.

Hospedales said the $400 mil­lion Eu­ro­pean Union grant which work­ers had claimed in re­cent years was ac­tu­al­ly meant for the Gov­ern­ment. He said some work­ers “cam­paigned” for the funds and got them.

He al­so con­firmed that no ef­forts had been made to pur­sue re­cov­ery of four trac­tors, har­vesters and oth­er large equip­ment which went miss­ing the week­end af­ter Ca­roni closed in 2003. An auc­tion­eer is be­ing en­gaged to sell as­sets val­ued at $13 mil­lion.

Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Michelle Durham-Ramkissoon said the Ca­roni wind-up was unique due to the in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions is­sues in­volved and it demon­strat­ed the length of time such mat­ters could be pro­longed by the courts. Gov­ern­ment has no con­trol over the du­ra­tion of these mat­ters.

She said with a num­ber of com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Petrotrin, be­ing wound up, con­ver­sa­tions are on-go­ing about guide­lines for com­pa­nies whose op­er­a­tions have end­ed.