Gail Alexan­der

The Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (PATT) didn’t have a PATT cred­it card pol­i­cy in place when it was found that a se­nior port man­ag­er had abused the cred­it card fa­cil­i­ty, Works Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan ad­mit­ted yes­ter­day.

Sinanan gave the in­for­ma­tion, re­spond­ing to op­po­si­tion queries in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day fol­low­ing re­ports that a se­nior PATT man­ag­er had abused the fa­cil­i­ty.

Sinanan said, “It was dis­cov­ered that a se­nior man­ag­er had used the Port Au­thor­i­ty Cred­it Card fa­cil­i­ty for per­son­nel pur­chas­es, the sums of which were re­paid when the month­ly state­ments were re­ceived.

“Al­though there was no of­fi­cial pol­i­cy in place at the Port Au­thor­i­ty for the use of the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s cred­it card fa­cil­i­ty, it was ex­pect­ed that the fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing the prop­er use of pub­lic funds, would be ad­hered to by au­tho­rised card hold­ers.

He said all au­tho­rised card­hold­ers are at a se­nior lev­el, “As a con­se­quence, an in­ves­ti­ga­tion was con­duct­ed in­to the mat­ter and the se­nior man­ag­er was re­quest­ed to pro­vide an ex­pla­na­tion for his ac­tions. The find­ings of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion were re­ferred to PATT’s Board of Com­mis­sion­ers for con­sid­er­a­tion and nec­es­sary ac­tion.”

A warn­ing let­ter was is­sued to the man­ag­er on the rec­om­men­da­tion of the Board’s Hu­man Re­source Com­mit­tee. Sinanan said the let­ter “ex­hort­ed the man­ag­er to de­sist from us­ing the card in that man­ner in fu­ture.”

He said a strict Cor­po­rate Cred­it Card Pol­i­cy was im­ple­ment­ed there­after.