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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Job cuts expected as 3 State agencies merge

by

Gail Alexander
510 days ago
20240222

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

The amal­ga­ma­tion of Ex­porTT, Cre­ativeTT and In­vestTT in­to a new en­ti­ty in April, will see the cur­rent to­tal of 154 staff mem­bers at those three agen­cies cut to around 90 to 100 peo­ple.

This was in­di­cat­ed by Trade Min­istry per­ma­nent sec­re­tary Ran­dall Karim yes­ter­day when Ex­porTT ap­peared be­fore Par­lia­ment’s Pub­lic Ac­counts (En­ter­pris­es) Com­mit­tee. The PAEC ex­am­ined Ex­porTT Lim­it­ed’s au­dit­ed ac­counts, bal­ance sheets and oth­er fi­nan­cial state­ments for 2018 and fol­lowed up on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of rec­om­men­da­tions in PAEC’s 28th re­port.

Ques­tioned by PAEC chair­man Wade Mark on the cur­rent amal­ga­ma­tion of the three com­pa­nies, Karim said the pur­pose was to cre­ate a new en­ti­ty that would be more op­er­a­tional­ly ef­fec­tive and to cre­ate syn­er­gies be­tween ex­ports and in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion. He said the le­gal process for amal­ga­ma­tion is near­ly com­plet­ed, and there are many le­gal and in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions is­sues that go with that.

Work is on­go­ing with the min­istry’s lawyers and con­sul­tants to achieve the new en­ti­ty by April. On the num­bers in­volved at the three en­ti­ties, Karim said cur­rent­ly the to­tal head­count is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 154 peo­ple in the or­gan­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture, but he wasn’t sure that was the ac­tu­al num­ber em­ployed.

“We’re look­ing at a new en­ti­ty in the vicin­i­ty of about 90 per­sons, give or take a few more de­pend­ing on some fi­nal de­ci­sion­sto be tak­en, so we’re mov­ing from about 150 to about 100 per­sons,” he said.

He added Ex­porTT cur­rent­ly has 80 peo­ple, In­vestTT, about 20 and Cre­ativeTT, 50. Ex­porTT work­ers are rep­re­sent­ed by BIG­WU, Karim added.

Mark al­so ex­pressed a very deep, long loud con­cern on an au­di­tor’s 2023 ob­ser­va­tions on Ex­porTT’s 2018 ac­counts where cheques were signed by per­son­nel not in­clud­ed on the list of au­tho­rised sig­na­to­ries pro­vid­ed and au­tho­rised peo­ple were sign­ing for amounts above au­tho­rised lim­its and this was ho­n­oured by banks.

Ex­porTT gen­er­al man­ag­er (op­er­a­tions) Maria Padil­la- Ben­jamin said from the 2020 au­dit there were two bank­ing and sign­ing res­o­lu­tions in the same year so a de­ci­sion was tak­en with a list of sig­na­to­ries and at some point in the same year an­oth­er de­ci­sion was tak­en.

“But the first set of peo­ple weren’t ad­vised of the sec­ond change and so con­tin­ued as the in­stru­ment pre­sent­ed to them said they were au­tho­rised un­til so told, to sign cheques on the en­ti­ty’s be­half. So they con­tin­ued sign­ing.”

Mark, claim­ing there was a break­down in Ex­porTT, called for a re­port. Karim said Ex­porTT gave the min­istry a re­port and this will be sent to PAEC. He said the bank was no­ti­fied of the in­con­sis­ten­cies, but Karim ad­mit­ted “ob­vi­ous­ly some­thing didn’t go well in 2028 and we’ve been as­sured by Ex­porTT the is­sues have been dealt with.”


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