Days af­ter the an­nounce­ment of a res­o­lu­tion plan to pay Gov­ern­ment and pol­i­cy­hold­ers of the Colo­nial Life In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny (Cli­co), var­i­ous an­a­lysts are now call­ing for more de­tails of the arrange­ment to be made pub­lic.

Among them is fi­nan­cial an­a­lyst David Walk­er, who in a tele­vi­sion in­ter­view yes­ter­day, asked what pre­vent­ed the Gov­ern­ment from pay­ing pol­i­cy­hold­ers soon­er and how in­ter­est will be cal­cu­lat­ed.

"You re­mem­ber in Oc­to­ber 2010 the Prime Min­is­ter and the then Min­is­ter of Fi­nance stood up in Par­lia­ment and told them that to pay peo­ple prop­er­ly, ac­cord­ing to con­tracts with­out hav­ing need for this law that banned le­gal ac­tion, would cost the na­tion an ad­di­tion­al $7 bil­lion on top of the $7 bil­lion that was al­ready spent.

"Now, my arith­metic tells me that sev­en and sev­en is 14. We could not have af­ford­ed then, we were told, so there had to be this al­ter­na­tive plan which pre­sum­ably would have cost less. Now we know that old plan was cost­ing some­where in the vicin­i­ty of $25 bil­lion yet sud­den­ly, we can af­ford it," he said

Ques­tions have al­so been raised by for­mer Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Mar­i­ano Browne, who ex­pressed con­cern about how the re­pay­ment will be fi­nanced.

"Let me hear where the mon­ey is. Let me hear the num­bers. The num­bers are what I am in­ter­est­ed in be­cause that re­al­ly tells you the com­pa­ny's po­si­tion, whether it is ca­pa­ble of do­ing it or not.

"This is an elec­tion year. This is a mat­ter they said that would have been fixed as part of an elec­tion promise. So that we are go­ing through the mo­tions. I mean, one of the is­sues would be what is the val­ue of An­gos­tu­ra? What is the val­ue of Home Con­struc­tion? Home Con­struc­tion is the largest land bank in the coun­try."

Econ­o­mist Mary King, in a com­men­tary post­ed on line, not­ed that the Cli­co calami­ty was not the on­ly one in the world but in the oth­er CAS­ES the gov­ern­ments han­dled the re­quests for cash flow bail outs dif­fer­ent­ly.

She wrote: "The US bailed out AIG (US$85 bil­lion), Bear Sterns and JP Mor­gan (US$29 bil­lion), Fan­nie May and Fred­die Mac (US$25 bil­lion). To­day these com­pa­nies have weath­ered the storm and have re­paid these ad­vances where nec­es­sary, the as­sets were pre­served and now are vi­able com­pa­nies."

King said in the case of Cli­co the hue and cry was to ad­vance mon­ey to the com­pa­ny's ben­e­fit so that "as many of their in­vestors could be paid off, hop­ing that when the glob­al econ­o­my picked up again the as­sets would be sold to re­pay gov­ern­ment and the rest of in­vestors and cred­i­tors."

She said no thought was giv­en to fund­ing Cli­co that it would weath­er the storm and emerge as a vi­able op­er­at­ing as­set that could re­pay its debts.

"To­day as the glob­al econ­o­my turns up we are here sell­ing what is left to pay debts, den­i­grat­ing our fi­nan­cial in­no­va­tors. In­stead we could have been cel­e­brat­ing the sur­vival of a con­glom­er­ate that was our own cre­ation," she said.

On Fri­day, Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­bar­ran an­nounced a plan to set­tle out­stand­ing debts owed by Cli­co to the T&T Gov­ern­ment and its pol­i­cy­hold­ers.