An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

The new board of ma­jor­i­ty State-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT) was in­stalled yes­ter­day, sources told Guardian Me­dia.

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath con­firmed the board was giv­en their in­stru­ments of ap­point­ment yes­ter­day af­ter­noon at the min­istry’s of­fice in Port-of-Spain.
Padarath on­ly con­firmed that the new TSTT chair­man is Kern Dass, a fi­nan­cial an­a­lyst and busi­ness­man. He added that a news re­lease will be sent out to­day.

Guardian Me­dia was told that the oth­er TSTT di­rec­tors are Randy Ram­ta­hal, Nadi­ra Prab­hu­di­al, Cas­sili­na Kelshall, and Kyle Mal­oney.

The new chair­man’s LinkedIn pro­file states Dass was a fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sor of the Year 2020 and 2021 and App­tiv­i­ty Cham­pi­on 2022 at the Mar­itime Fi­nan­cial Group.  

“I am an ex­pe­ri­enced sales man­ag­er with a demon­strat­ed his­to­ry of work­ing in the fi­nan­cial ser­vices in­dus­try. Skilled in bank­ing, com­mer­cial bank­ing, fi­nan­cial ad­vi­so­ry, in­sur­ance and busi­ness re­la­tion­ship man­age­ment. Strong sales pro­fes­sion­al with a BSc. Fo­cused in eco­nom­ics and man­age­ment from Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus,” Dass said in his post.

Last month, TSTT’s for­mer chair­man and board of di­rec­tors re­signed as did the board of its whol­ly owned sub­sidiary, Am­plia.

The res­ig­na­tions fol­lowed Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Bar­ry Padarath’s di­rec­tive to TSTT and Am­plia, to put a hold on all hu­man re­source ac­tions un­til fur­ther no­tice, ef­fec­tive im­me­di­ate­ly.

In an in­ter­view last month, Padarath said the TSTT board re­fused to re­sign. As such, an in­ter­nal memo was is­sued and de­tailed that the di­rec­tive ap­plied across all cat­e­gories of em­ploy­ment—per­ma­nent, tem­po­rary, part-time, con­tract, con­sul­tan­cy, and con­tin­gent work­ers.

How­ev­er, a for­mer board di­rec­tor said it was far from the truth that the board was re­fus­ing to re­sign.  

“We stayed on the board as we were told to stay on un­til the new board was put in place. We take our di­rec­tives from the chair­man and not the min­is­ter. This is un­nec­es­sary con­fu­sion and putting our names in dis­pute for no rea­son. It is pub­lic knowl­edge that when a new gov­ern­ment comes in­to of­fice, the state board mem­bers and chair have to re­sign. Oth­er state board mem­bers are re­sign­ing with­out any is­sues, but dra­mas must be over TSTT and Am­plia,” the for­mer di­rec­tor lament­ed.

TSTT is joint­ly owned by Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd (NEL) and Ca­ble & Wire­less (West In­dies) Ltd (C&W). NEL owns 51 per cent of TSTT’s is­sued share cap­i­tal, while C&W holds 49 per cent. NEL is ma­jor­i­ty-owned by the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Am­plia Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Ltd is a whol­ly-owned sub­sidiary of the TSTT group with its board of di­rec­tors and man­age­ment. TSTT ac­quired 100 per cent share­hold­ing of Massy Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Ltd (MCL) on Ju­ly 31, 2017, for $215 mil­lion, au­dit­ed and as­sessed to be $42 mil­lion less than the “net book val­ue” of the as­sets.  TSTT then changed the name to Am­plia.