PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Con­cerns over the lead­er­ship and lim­it­ed pay­out to share­hold­ers by Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices of Trinidad and Toba­go (TSTT) were brought to the fore dur­ing the an­nu­al meet­ing of ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd (NEL)yes­ter­day.

An ex­clu­sive re­port in the last Sun­day Guardian has led to ques­tions over the in­voice sub­mit­ted to the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny for a re­cent­ly held re­treat for com­pa­ny ex­ec­u­tives.

While the com­pa­ny has stat­ed that news­pa­per re­port in­flat­ed the ac­tu­al cost in­curred by the com­pa­ny for the re­treat, the mat­ter was not far from the minds of NEL share­hold­ers yes­ter­day.

NEL owns 51 per cent of TSTT, one of sev­en com­pa­nies in which the in­vest­ment hold­ings com­pa­ny owns shares.

“Last week or some­time, we had an­oth­er set of in­for­ma­tion com­ing out from TSTT, where they had this re­treat and so on and so forth, and the union threat­en­ing to say that they have cer­tain amount of ad­di­tion­al wrong­do­ing that they will come out with. What are we do­ing as the ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er there? What have we done in terms of maybe in­ves­ti­gat­ing or look­ing in­to that sit­u­a­tion?” asked NEL share­hold­er Gokool Seemu­n­gal, who not­ed that TSTT had con­sis­tent­ly failed to pay div­i­dends to share­hold­ers.

How­ev­er NEL gen­er­al man­ag­er Charles May­nard ex­plained that a probe in­to TSTT could not be sanc­tioned by the NEL board.

“We again, do not get in­volved in the op­er­a­tional as­pect of the com­pa­ny or any com­pa­ny. That com­pa­ny has a ful­ly equipped man­age­ment team and board of di­rec­tors. So, what we do, we make sure that any of the di­rec­tion­al strate­gies are cov­ered with­in the cor­po­rate gov­er­nance of TSTT and its board and its man­age­ment. So, ask­ing about, like, the unions, man­age­ment ac­tiv­i­ties or de­ci­sions, that’s not some­thing that a share­hold­er would be in­volved in,” said May­nard.

Share­hold­ers al­so raised con­cerns about the ab­sence of board mem­bers, in­clud­ing some based in for­eign coun­tries.

TSTT Chair­man Kern Dass was elect­ed to the board of di­rec­tors of NEL dur­ing the meet­ing. He said the con­cern raised by share­hold­ers were valid.

“I think all the con­cerns are valid and of course I think with the new board there is a lot of ex­per­tise that I feel that we could utilise so that we could fix what­ev­er is­sues that would have been ad­dressed to­day,” said Dass.

Ear­li­er in the meet­ing, May­nard re­capped NEL’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance for 2025, con­firm­ing it had re­port­ed a net prof­it of $15.3 mil­lion, which rep­re­sent­ed a re­ver­sal from the un­re­al­ized net loss of $348.7 mil­lion record­ed in 2024.