Geisha Kow­lessar

Gov­ern­ment has or­dered a full foren­sic au­dit to de­ter­mine ex­act­ly how much tax­pay­ers' mon­ey was pumped in­to the bail out of Colo­nial Life and CL Fi­nan­cial in light of bil­lion-dol­lar dis­crep­an­cies, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said yes­ter­day.

Speak­ing at a post-Cab­i­net press con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's, Im­bert said the ex­act cost of the bailout Colo­nial Life and CL Fi­nan­cial was still un­cer­tain.

He said so as he not­ed CL Fi­nan­cial's ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er Lawrence Duprey's in­ten­tion to take le­gal ac­tion against the Gov­ern­ment to block Gov­ern­ment's pro­posed sale of CLF as­sets, which was re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly in yes­ter­day's T&T Guardian.

Im­bert said he had in his pos­ses­sion a let­ter, dared March 22, writ­ten by Duprey and sent to the gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank.

In the let­ter, Duprey had asked for con­sid­er­a­tion to be giv­en for him to have a role in the di­vest­ment of the Cli­co as­sets.

In re­sponse, how­ev­er, the Cen­tral Bank said it was un­able to treat with it. Im­bert said he al­so re­ceived a let­ter, dat­ed the fol­low­ing day, re­gard­ing sug­ges­tions on the way for­ward for CL Fi­nan­cial, which was be­ing ex­am­ined.

"How­ev­er, a lot of these de­tails with re­spect to the takeover of Colo­nial Life and the agree­ment be­tween CL Fi­nan­cial... a lot of these things have been shroud­ed in se­cre­cy over the last five years and there have been a num­ber of vari­a­tions to the orig­i­nal agree­ment and ex­ten­sions to the share," Im­bert said.

Im­bert added there have been some 16 ex­ten­sions to the share­hold­ers' agree­ment be­tween CL Fi­nan­cial and the Gov­ern­ment.

He said the lat­est one was a heads of agree­ment en­tered in­to on May 24, 2013, be­tween the for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai and Roger Duprey, who rep­re­sent­ed the Unit­ed Share­hold­ers' Com­pa­ny Ltd with re­spect to the dis­pos­al of all of the as­sets and a way for­ward.

"In that doc­u­ment it states that Gov­ern­ment had ad­vanced, by way of fi­nan­cial sup­port to the af­fect­ed sub­sidiaries, $19.6 bil­lion," Im­bert said.

Say­ing there was dis­agree­ment be­tween CL Fi­nan­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tives and the Unit­ed Share­hold­ers Com­pa­ny Ltd on the fig­ure, Im­bert added:

"Based on the dis­crep­an­cies be­tween what is in this agree­ment and the in­for­ma­tion that is in the pub­lic's do­main, Gov­ern­ment is owed ap­prox­i­mate­ly $24.5 bil­lion... and this doc­u­ment speaks to $19.6 bil­lion. There is con­fu­sion as to how much of tax­pay­ers' mon­ey was put in­to this bailout," Im­bert said.

He al­so sought to clar­i­fy what ap­peared to be con­fu­sion in dis­tin­guish­ing the dif­fer­ence be­tween Colo­nial Life and CL Fi­nan­cial.

He said Colo­nial Life was tak­en over by the Cen­tral Bank un­der the emer­gency pow­ers.

"And it is the Cen­tral Bank in pur­suant of that re­spon­si­bil­i­ty that is dis­pos­ing of the as­sets of Colo­nial Life, which would in­clude poli­cies, shares in Re­pub­lic Bank and An­gos­tu­ra.

"CL Fi­nan­cial is a hold­ing com­pa­ny that owns shares in Colo­nial Life, An­gos­tu­ra and Home Con­struc­tion and com­pa­nies like CL Ma­rine," Im­bert added.

He said Colo­nial Life owed the Gov­ern­ment $16.9 bil­lion, of which on­ly $4 bil­lion was re­paid.

Im­bert said with­in the next three weeks a note would be sent to Cab­i­net on plans re­gard­ing the re­cov­ery of monies.

Im­bert al­so said re­cent meet­ings with the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund and the World Bank dealt with dis­cussing tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance and not im­pos­ing any fi­nan­cial re­stric­tions on T&T.

"There was no meet­ing per say to go drilling down in­to what's go­ing on in T&T and to im­pose con­di­tions. We sim­ply met with ex­perts to ad­vise us on cer­tain mat­ters," Im­bert said.

He said the IMF meet­ing in par­tic­u­lar was to ad­vise on the oil and gas tax­a­tion regime and trans­fer pric­ing where multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies avoid­ed pay­ing tax­es.