Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

It is time to mod­ernise the Unit Trust Act, chair­man of the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion Prof Ger­ry Brooks has said.

Brooks made the state­ment as the UTC held its vir­tu­al An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing yes­ter­day.

“Four decades have elapsed since the orig­i­nal Unit Cor­po­ra­tion Act (UTC) was en­act­ed in 1982, when the mu­tu­al fund in­dus­try was in its nascent stages and the UTC was the on­ly play­er. Since then, fi­nan­cial mar­kets have un­der­gone pro­found trans­for­ma­tion. Y2K and the tech­nol­o­gy rev­o­lu­tion have fa­cil­i­tat­ed a to­tal shift in cus­tomer and mar­ket ex­pec­ta­tions. The pan­dem­ic has re­shaped the world, re­set­ting pri­or­i­ties, cre­at­ing seis­mic shifts in eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, in­vest­ment, and mar­ket ar­chi­tec­ture,” Brooks said.

Brook ar­gued the UTC Act must be re­freshed, and that amend­ments have been pro­posed to mod­ernise our leg­isla­tive frame­work.

“Changes to the UTC Act are im­per­a­tive! These changes will al­low us to com­pete in this new en­vi­ron­ment, meet the needs of our cus­tomers with new prod­ucts, and pro­vide greater flex­i­bil­i­ty to cap­i­talise on op­por­tu­ni­ties in new mar­kets. The ear­ly pas­sage of our pro­posed leg­isla­tive amend­ments will en­hance the Cor­po­ra­tion’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, re­in­force good gov­er­nance, and widen our net­work of in­vest­ment and in­sti­tu­tion­al part­ners, both here and abroad,” Brooks said.

In the UTC’s An­nu­al Re­port Brooks urged the Gov­ern­ment to ac­cel­er­ate the pas­sage of the “vi­tal­ly need­ed amend­ments.”

The Act has to be amend­ed in Par­lia­ment.

UTC’s ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Nigel Ed­wards said de­spite the “enor­mous chal­lenges” caused by COVID-19 the cor­po­ra­tion, once again, showed why it’s the “most qual­i­fied and trust­ed in­vest­ment part­ner for in­vestors seek­ing con­sis­tent fi­nan­cial goals.”

Ed­wards said UTC de­liv­ered growth in net sales of $805Mn in 2020; 10 times more than the cor­po­ra­tion’s net sales in 2019.

He said the last eigh­teen months have taught two ma­jor lessons:

Les­son 1: For­get about sav­ing and in­vest­ing for a rainy day. What this pan­dem­ic has taught us is that sav­ing, and in­vest­ing is no longer an op­tion – it is crit­i­cal – it is nec­es­sary

Les­son 2: Those who think long term about their in­vest­ments and re­main in­vest­ed will be re­ward­ed; con­sid­er that one year af­ter COVID-19 shook the in­vest­ing world, stocks in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and lo­cal­ly have since re­cov­ered, cre­at­ing wealth for those who stayed the course.