There is no doubt that the decision by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to appoint a Commission of Enquiry to investigate the collapse of the CL Financial and HCU empires has the potential to be one of the more astute of her term of office. But the commission can turn out to be an outstanding success for the Government or it may result in the misery of millions spent with no clear and quantifiable outcome. At the end of the day, the outcome really depends on the ability of the sole commissioner, Sir Anthony Colman, to marshal the tremendous amount of evidence that will be placed before him and deliver a report that credibly reflects that evidence.
Sir Anthony's abilities, of course, are unknown to most (but not all) nationals of T&T.But just as Prof John Uff revealed himself-in the course of conducting the Commissioner of Enquiry into Udecott and this country's construction sector-to be utterly fair and professional, it is expected that Sir Anthony will conduct the enquiry in accordance with the highest standards of the English bar. The extent of Sir Anthony's success also depends, to a very great extent, on his ability to understand this one crucially important fact: At the end of the day, the collapse of HCU and CL Financial is primarily an issue of the thousands of people who trusted their life's savings to institutions whose failure has jeopardised their ability to live the life they expected.
That failure has not only shattered the future of those who invested billions in the institutions, but it has also impacted the confidence that the average working Trinidadian and Tobagonian has in the local financial system which, in turn, has contributed to sub-optimal investment decisions or no investment decisions at all. Unfortunately for the sole commissioner, the terms of reference that he has been mandated to report on are, to a large extent, silent on what should be the central issue of the Commission of Enquiry. The terms of reference, inter alia, require Sir Anthony to probe the legal and fiscal bases which informed the decision of the Government in January 2009 to inject funding into CL Financial.
He is also required to investigate the effectiveness of the accounting and auditing firms and the regulators in governing the business and affairs of the companies in the CL Financial group. He will, as well, probe the extent to which it may have been possible to prevent the interests of those with money in CL Financial from being compromised or threatened. To a large extent, therefore, the focus is on the cause of the collapse rather than the effect of the collapse. While a focus on cause may be appropriate in a country with a long tradition of learning lessons and extracting meaning from failure in a way that is transformative, T&T is certainly not such a country-given its past experiences with commissions of enquiry.
Now, it may be that focusing on the cause of the disasters will lead to some clearer understanding of the impact that these colossal financial failures have had on the people who invested their money in Clico, Clico Investment Bank, Caribbean Money Market Brokers, British American and HCU. Again, past experience on this matter is not cause for optimism as there is a tendency in this country to blame the victims and not the perpetrators. Given his utterances on the first day of the Commission of Enquiry, Sir Anthony seems to have indicated that he is not yet clued in on what for most Trinidadians and Tobagonians is the central mission of this investigation. There is some hope, and expectation, that this will change by day two of the enquiry, which is on April 6, a little less than one month away.