Gail Alexan­der

The PNM owes state-owned Caribbean New Me­dia Group (CN­MG) $600,000 for ads and cov­er­age of po­lit­i­cal ral­lies from the 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion, ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, Col­in Par­tap.He re­vealed that in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, re­ply­ing to an Op­po­si­tion ques­tion on CN­MG.Par­tap said the new Gov­ern­ment, on en­ter­ing of­fice, found CN­MG to be a loss-mak­ing en­ter­prise.He said the com­pa­ny, which be­gan op­er­a­tions in mid-2005, so far had been fund­ed by tax­pay­ers to a tune of $235 mil­lion.

Par­tap said more than $6 mil­lion was owed by ad­ver­tis­ers since the com­pa­ny's ear­ly months of op­er­a­tions, in­clud­ing $1.1 mil­lion by gov­ern­ment agen­cies and com­pa­nies, state agen­cies and statu­to­ry bod­ies.Par­tap added: "The PNM owes $600,000 for ad­ver­tis­ing and cov­er­age of po­lit­i­cal ral­lies for the 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion."He said a firm of debt col­lec­tors was em­ployed re­cent­ly to col­lect out­stand­ing re­ceiv­ables.

Par­tap said the Gov­ern­ment in­struct­ed the com­pa­ny's man­age­ment to de­vise a plan aimed on mak­ing CN­MG fi­nan­cial­ly vi­able in the short­est pos­si­ble time.He said Gov­ern­ment was in­formed by CN­MG's act­ing CEO that the busi­ness plan could see the com­pa­ny be­com­ing fi­nan­cial­ly self-suf­fi­cient with­in three years.He said all ma­jor cost cen­tres at CN­MG were be­ing re­viewed and the com­pa­ny was ac­tive­ly seek­ing to max­imise earn­ing and to re­duce op­er­at­ing costs.

He added: "A staff ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion ex­er­cise is cur­rent­ly un­der­way as one of the cen­tral ways of im­prov­ing CN­MG's fi­nan­cial state."It is too ear­ly to de­ter­mine how many jobs will ul­ti­mate­ly be af­fect­ed."He said the aim was to in­tro­duce a high lev­el of pro­fes­sion­al ef­fi­cien­cy and im­prove prod­ucts and ser­vices.He pro­ject­ed sav­ings of be­tween $3 mil­lion to $4 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly from the mea­sure.Par­tap added: "It is ac­knowl­edged, how­ev­er, that the com­pa­ny will not im­me­di­ate­ly ar­rive at that de­sir­able fi­nan­cial po­si­tion."Along with that ex­er­cise, the com­pa­ny is com­mit­ted to boost­ing earn­ings in core and non-core busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties by up to $5 mil­lion a year from its cur­rent fi­nan­cial year and for the next three years."