Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

?Thou­sands of Ca­roni work­ers who lost mil­lions of dol­lars in an in­vest­ment scheme with the Agri­cul­tur­al De­vel­op­ment Bank (ADB) are plan­ning to sue the in­sti­tu­tion for breach of promis­es. The planned lit­i­ga­tion stems from loss­es in­curred in the in­vest­ment of their 2003 Vol­un­tary Sep­a­ra­tion Pack­ages in the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion In­di­vid­ual Re­tire­ment Unit Ac­count. The ac­count, which was sup­posed to yield an in­ter­est rate of 12 per cent over a six-year pe­ri­od, re­port­ed­ly col­lapsed and sug­ar work­ers were told that they did not have any in­ter­est to col­lect on their cap­i­tal in­vest­ments.

Around 11 am yes­ter­day, hun­dreds of for­mer work­ers gath­ered at the Ste Madeleine Recre­ation Ground to dis­cuss the is­sue. A high-pow­ered le­gal team, com­pris­ing of at­tor­neys Om Lal­la, Kelvin Ramkissoon, Derek Bal­li­ram and Bob­by Boodram, was or­gan­ised by Crime Watch pres­i­dent Ian Al­leyne to ad­dress the for­mer work­ers. Al­leyne said he would not rest un­til jus­tice was served. He said the Gov­ern­ment had an oblig­a­tion to as­sist the for­mer work­ers. "I will make sure that each and every one of you gets jus­tice. We are go­ing to sue them. We will give them a run for your mon­ey," Al­leyne said to loud ap­plause. Lal­la told work­ers that his le­gal team was try­ing to ac­quire in­for­ma­tion from the ADB.

He said a let­ter was sent to the ADB on Fri­day, re­quest­ing de­tails in­to why clients were re­fused pay­ment of the in­ter­est de­rived from their in­vest­ments.

He al­so re­quest­ed full dis­clo­sure of all doc­u­ments pur­port­ed­ly signed by work­ers, any oth­er doc­u­ments pro­vid­ed to work­ers, a state­ment of the in­vest­ment and growth of the funds for each work­er, an ex­pla­na­tion of how ADB in­vest­ed the monies, the date of in­vest­ment, as well as in­for­ma­tion on the mea­sures tak­en by the ADB to ad­vise clients about the risks in­volved. Lal­la said some of his clients re­ceived bank state­ments as late as June, in­di­cat­ing that their funds were safe.

He al­so said that UTC and ADB were owned by the Gov­ern­ment and it was sus­pi­cious that on­ly the ex-work­ers were com­plain­ing of loss of

in­vest­ments. Ramkissoon de­scribed the loss as an in­jus­tice to the work­ers who gave their lives to the sug­ar in­dus­try. Ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber of the Ex-Ca­roni Work­ers As­so­ci­a­tion Al­lan Pre­m­dass said work­ers did not have any mon­ey for the fu­ture. "Some of us can't even find mon­ey to buy food, much less pay for the res­i­den­tial plot that was promised to us," he said. He added that the clo­sure of Ca­roni creased wide­spread, so­cial, eco­nom­ic and psy­cho­log­i­cal dev­as­ta­tion to thou­sands of peo­ple.