On Monday, Massy Holdings president and CEO, Gervase Warner, said the job of the group’s executive vice president, Angelique Parisot-Potter, was not in jeopardy because of the comment she made at the company’s annual meeting.
Yesterday, the board of the company initiated a disciplinary process to review Parisot-Potter’s conduct at the meeting.
In a statement last night, published as an advertisement in this newspaper, the Massy board said the disciplinary process would weigh Parisot-Potter’s conduct at the meeting “against her duties as the General Counsel to the Company and will follow due process to determine how this should be handled responsibly yet decisively.”
In an exclusive story from inside the Massy annual meeting, Guardian Media reported that Parisot-Potter said “the company is spending scarce foreign exchange on an executive management programme in Fort Myers, Florida that involves ‘bizarre rituals’ and ‘highly dubious activities’.”
The Massy board said, “The company categorically denies using the programme to train people to communicate with the dead or heal with ‘white light’ as alleged by Ms Parisot-Potter. The statements are patently untrue, scandalous and designed to solicit fear.”
The Massy board said it was appalled at her conduct.
The board said that on November 26, Parisot-Potter submitted a 13-page document of allegations and concerns to Warner, the Group CEO.
The company’s board said it “takes seriously all allegations and has initiated an independent process to look into each of Mrs Parisot-Potter’s allegations.”
But the board said it was concerned that Parisot-Potter used the occasion of the company’s 100th annual meeting to follow up on her submission with public disclosure of a matter confidential to the company.
“The board has initiated a disciplinary process to review Ms Parisot-Potter’s conduct at the annual meeting against her duties as the general counsel to the company and will follow due process to determine how this should be handled responsibly yet decisively,” the statement said.
In an interview with Guardian Media after the annual meeting on Monday, Warner was asked whether Parisot-Potter’s job was not in jeopardy.
“Not because of what she said at the AGM (annual general meeting),” he responded.
Asked whether the 13-page letter she wrote in November meant that the Massy executive was not aligned with the rest of the company’s management team, Warner said, “That is an interpretation that I cannot expand upon because that would be for her to speak to.”
Questioned on where Parisot-Potter stands in the executive management of Massy, the company’s CEO and president said, “What do you mean? She is the general counsel.”
Asked if she remains the general counsel, Warner said, “She remains the general counsel, as we speak.”
In the interview on Monday, Warner defended the use of Delphi Sphere Consulting, a Fort Myers-based executive training firm.
Responding to a question about the group’s use of foreign exchange, the Massy CEO described the expenditure of between US$500,000 and US$1 million a year on Delphi as a “drop in the bucket,” of the group’s expenditure on training and development for its 13,000 employees.
“Part of why we are able to raise foreign exchange in this country is through the performance of our businesses. And there is a direct linkage to the performance of our businesses and the investment in these training programmes,” said Warner. Especially the training programme that formed the basis of Parisot-Potter’s complaint, he said.
“So I would argue that it is actually a net generator of foreign exchange because we make this investment and then we are able to get our export-earning businesses to perform better, to earn us more foreign exchange,” Warner added.