Leader of the Opposition Dr Keith Rowley says the People's Partnership Government, and not the dismissed board, must take responsibility for the "kangkatang" at State-owned Caribbean Airlines.Commenting yesterday, Rowley said changing the board "doesn't do anything but put us on the first step in a long journey to getting (CAL) back to sanity."He said CAL was properly mismanaged and the appointment of the previous board to run that billion-dollar enterprise had been a scandal.
Rowley said: "The outgoing board should never have been there in the first place. They were entirely unsuitable."Rowley said the airline was made to make the same mistakes the former BWIA made. He said a viable business plan was devised for CAL under the Arthur Lok Jack board and that plan should be reimplemented in the interest of the airline.He said CAL was "really doing well" under the Patrick Manning government.
Rowley said when the People's Partnership came to power, CAL had "US$150 million in the bank as its current account and working cash flow. And that was a healthy situation."According to Rowley, the PP Government and not the board, decided to purchase a number of ATR aircraft from the current account, and that was not the best way to finance the project as it resulted in a cash-flow problem for the airline.He said the Government also appointed unsuitable people to the board.
He said over the past three years, "the minister, the chairman, the board, the management was just one kangkatang after the other."During the same period, he said, Government wasted US$150 million from the current account and added another $800 million in debt and re-established the London route "in a most ridiculous way."
Rowley said he objected to the arrangement to have Air jamaica as part of the CAL arrangement. Rowley said he raised the matter in his no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister last year but no government minister responded. But if the statements made by the Opposition in that debate had been heeded, he said, the board would have been changed earlier and the airline could have been in a better position.