Mark Bas­sant

Lead Ed­i­tor, In­ves­tiga­tive Desk

Ven­ture Cred­it Union (VCU) board pres­i­dent Hay­den Fer­reira has been sus­pend­ed with im­me­di­ate ef­fect un­til the Spe­cial Gen­er­al Meet­ing (SGM) is con­vened at a date still to be de­ter­mined, ac­cord­ing to well-placed sources.

The sus­pen­sion came af­ter the Ven­ture Cred­it Union Su­per­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee wrote to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Com­mis­sion­er of Co-op­er­a­tives, claim­ing that the VCU board was in vi­o­la­tion of its bye-laws and had failed to act on the re­quest of mem­bers, who had been ask­ing for the re­moval of the cred­it union’s CEO Rox­anne Solomon since June this year. The mem­bers had cit­ed a loss of con­fi­dence in her abil­i­ty to do the job, as ex­clu­sive­ly re­port­ed by the Sun­day Guardian last week in an on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the mat­ter.

Sources are tight-lipped on fur­ther de­tails sur­round­ing Fer­reira’s sus­pen­sion.

How­ev­er, con­tact­ed briefly via tele­phone on Fri­day, Fer­reira in­di­cat­ed, “All I can tell you is I have no knowl­edge and there is no com­mu­ni­ca­tion at all to that ef­fect at this time.”

Sev­er­al sources con­firmed that the Com­mis­sion­er of the Co-op­er­a­tive of­fice is fa­mil­iar with the sus­pen­sion but to date, an of­fi­cial email is yet to be cir­cu­lat­ed about the sus­pen­sion and sent in­ter­nal­ly or ex­ter­nal­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to the bye-laws of VCU, un­der sec­tion 19 and in the sub-sec­tion on Gen­er­al Meet­ings, “A Spe­cial Gen­er­al Meet­ing shall be held at any time on the re­quest of the pres­i­dent, the Board, the Su­per­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee, the Com­mis­sion­er or his rep­re­sen­ta­tive or on re­ceipt by the Sec­re­tary of a writ­ten req­ui­si­tion signed by not less than fifty(50) mem­bers. Four­teen (14) days’ no­tice shall be giv­en to all mem­bers.”

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that apart from the 46 em­ploy­ees who signed the pe­ti­tion for the re­moval of Solomon, they have since got­ten ad­di­tion­al sig­na­tures from em­ploy­ees of the bar­gain­ing unit to make up the req­ui­site 50 mem­bers to en­sure that the Spe­cial Gen­er­al Meet­ing (SGM) is called.

The cred­it union has 119 em­ploy­ees, some of whom are not unionised. Em­ploy­ees from the San Fer­nan­do, Arou­ca and Cou­va branch­es signed the pe­ti­tion, af­ter a let­ter was sent to VCU’s board and su­per­vi­so­ry com­mit­tee, branch ex­ec­u­tive team and Bank­ing In­sur­ance and Gen­er­al Work­ers’ Union (BIG­WU) sec­ond vice pres­i­dent Ja­son Brown, out­lin­ing why they had lost faith in the CEO.

Sources with­in VCU con­firmed that nei­ther the Com­mis­sion­er of Co-op­er­a­tives nor the VCU board sec­re­tary re­spond­ed to the ini­tial pe­ti­tion re­quest­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the cred­it union op­er­a­tions via an SGM. How­ev­er, the Su­per­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee was able to suc­ceed where con­cerned mem­bers would have failed, lead­ing to Fer­reira’s sus­pen­sion, ac­cord­ing to sources.

These con­tentious mat­ters have come af­ter at least three ex­clu­sive Guardian Me­dia ar­ti­cles in which sev­er­al VCU em­ploy­ees ex­pressed con­cern about some of the cred­it union’s fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions and the per­ceived busi­ness trans­ac­tions sanc­tioned by CEO Solomon and pres­i­dent Fer­reira.

They in­di­cat­ed there are at least two com­pa­nies—whose own­ers are re­lat­ed to two se­nior ex­ec­u­tives at VCU—that were al­leged­ly paid to pro­vide ex­ter­nal ser­vices. The pro­vi­sion of these ser­vices, they al­leged, rep­re­sent­ed a con­flict of in­ter­est and re­quired spe­cial ap­proval be­fore go­ing for­ward.

Both Fer­reira and Solomon have said all the trans­ac­tions in­volv­ing the com­pa­nies were above board and sub­ject to the in­de­pen­dent ap­proval of the cred­it union’s pro­cure­ment of­fice.