Sean Nero

Mem­bers of East­ern Cred­it Union (ECU) on Mon­day chas­tised the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion's board of di­rec­tors, led by Wayne Estra­da, claim­ing their pub­lic squab­bles are em­bar­rass­ing the or­gan­i­sa­tion and threat­en­ing its sta­bil­i­ty.

At a spe­cial meet­ing at the cred­it union's La Joya Com­plex head­quar­ters, St Joseph, share­hold­ers voiced frus­tra­tion at the man­ner in which ECU's af­fairs are be­ing man­aged and told the di­rec­tors to deal with the is­sues now tar­nish­ing the im­age of the in­sti­tu­tion.

Ten­sions at the board lev­el of ECU reached boil­ing point last No­vem­ber when a spe­cial meet­ing was called to re­move Alana Black­man as pres­i­dent, cit­ing a re­port­ed lack of con­fi­dence in her lead­er­ship. Di­rec­tors vot­ed to have Estra­da re­place her un­til the an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing in March.

Black­man's lead­er­ship came in­to ques­tion over al­le­ga­tions of im­pro­pri­ety in the award of con­tracts by EPL Prop­er­ties Ltd, a sub­sidiary of the cred­it union, for a re­al es­tate de­vel­op­ment at Las Vivien­das, Va­len­cia. The 16 acres of land was sold to ECU for $5 mil­lion two years ago.

At Mon­day's meet­ing the mem­ber­ship held the view that mat­ters re­lat­ing to the pur­chase did not point to any de­cep­tion by the board but dis­cre­tionary al­lowances in mak­ing the best de­ci­sion, based on in­for­ma­tion in hand.

Since then a new dra­ma has un­fold­ed which caused di­rec­tor Har­vey Bor­ris to di­rect his at­tor­ney to is­sue a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter against Estra­da and the re­main­ing ECU di­rec­tors for al­leged slan­der.

Share­hold­ers called on Bor­ris to with­draw the le­gal ac­tion and serve out his term as a di­rec­tor in the in­ter­est of stake­hold­ers.Estra­da, how­ev­er, told the meet­ing that de­spite their calls for con­cil­i­a­tion Bor­ris' ac­tions made it im­pos­si­ble for them to work as a team.