Melis­sa Doughty

Pres­i­dent of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union Joseph Re­my has made a re­newed call for an in­ves­ti­ga­tion to be launched in­to the ap­point­ment of Di­an­na De Sousa as act­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer (CEO) of state-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT). TSTT's chair­man Ever­ald Snag­gs an­nounced De Sousa's ap­point­ment as act­ing CEO on Ju­ly 1.

Re­my made the call at a press con­fer­ence held at the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union head­quar­ters on Hen­ry Street, Port-of-Spain, to in­tro­duce Philip Jen­nings, gen­er­al sec­re­tary of UNI Glob­al Union, and oth­er Caribbean trade union­ists. "We got com­mu­ni­ca­tion from our mem­bers that Ms De Sousa was tout­ed as the one to be ap­point­ed," Re­my said. "We got a doc­u­ment un­der the head­ing Pub­lic Util­i­ties, list­ing her as the CEO of TSTT, along with Mr Gan­ga Singh.

"Now Mr Gan­ga Singh moved from WASA about a week or more ago but that means that her list­ing of CEO was even pri­or to that and when we raised ques­tions, no one an­swered." He said queries were made with for­mer Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Em­manuel George and the union is now go­ing to en­gage new­ly-ap­point­ed min­is­ter Nizam Baksh.

Re­my al­so said the union wrote to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and will al­so com­mu­ni­cate with line min­is­ter Baksh, ques­tion­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the union and TSTT's man­age­ment. "We can't say who to ap­point, but we should be able to say the process for the ap­point­ment must be trans­par­ent and must nev­er ap­pear to have po­lit­i­cal in­flu­ence in it," he said.

Re­my be­lieves the TSTT board sim­ply car­ried out a po­lit­i­cal di­rec­tive and so is ask­ing the com­pa­ny's man­age­ment to re­veal the re­sults of the in­ter­view process to se­lect the act­ing CEO. A press re­lease was sent to var­i­ous me­dia hous­es, signed by act­ing sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the union, Bryan St Louis, call­ing on Baksh to launch an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to their com­plaint. The union said it was pre­pared to take the nec­es­sary le­gal ac­tion if it deemed the re­sponse un­sat­is­fac­to­ry.