Oust­ed chair­man of the To­ba­go di­vi­sion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce Claude Benoit ad­mits to feel­ing a lev­el of “dis­trust” and “dis­ap­point­ment” by what he deems a “coup d’etat against him,” by mem­bers of the ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment of the To­ba­go Cham­ber while he was out of the coun­try on va­ca­tion.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia on Thurs­day, Benoit said he was sur­prised by the ac­tion since be­fore he left for va­ca­tion “I held a meet­ing with them, and we had no prob­lem.”

Benoit said Vice Chair­man Mar­tin George was not at that meet­ing but was out of the coun­try, but he ex­plained that once the Chair­man is out the Vice Chair­man nat­u­ral­ly takes over the reins of the Cham­ber un­til the Chair­man re­turn.

He was there­fore sur­prised on his re­turn to find out that he had been re­moved from of­fice. “It was a coup d’etat. There is no two ways about it,” Benoit said point­ing out that all “op­er­a­tional man­age­ment and de­ci­sion-mak­ing pow­ers” were re­moved from his re­mit and the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty was giv­en to George.

Benoit said as a re­sult of the ac­tion, he said, he felt a lev­el of “dis­trust and dis­ap­point­ment. These are peo­ple I left work­ing with and they did that in my ab­sence, they did it be­hind my back.”

It is for this rea­son, he said, he did not com­mu­ni­cate with any of the Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee mem­bers when he re­turned, nei­ther did he feel he had the au­thor­i­ty to call the Com­mit­tee to­geth­er to find out why they had tak­en the de­ci­sion.

He ex­plained that the po­si­tion of Chair­man “is a vol­un­tary po­si­tion and I am not pre­pared to vol­un­teer my­self to be hu­mil­i­at­ed in any form or fash­ion by try­ing to hold meet­ings and go to meet­ings when they will say you don’t have the pow­er to do that. You don’t sub­ject your­self to hu­mil­i­a­tion like that. I vol­un­teer to help the de­vel­op­ment of the is­land,” Benoit said.

Ad­mit­ting that he did not feel “com­fort­able,” speak­ing to any of the Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee mem­bers, Benoit said he in­stead sought ad­vice from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber CEO Gabriel Faria and Pres­i­dent Ronald Hinds.

With­out a so­lu­tion to the is­sue be­ing found, George ten­dered his res­ig­na­tion with im­me­di­ate ef­fect by let­ter dat­ed Oc­to­ber 2nd to the T&T Cham­ber and the mem­bers of the To­ba­go man­age­ment Com­mit­tee. Benoit ad­mit­ted the res­ig­na­tion was a "shock­er."

George cit­ed the de­mands of his of­fice which he said, “dic­tate that I will not be able to de­vote the time re­quired to con­tin­ue with this, which ap­pears to be rather cycli­cal and in my re­spect­ful view counter-pro­duc­tive, in­stead of be­ing for­ward-mov­ing and pro­gres­sive.”

He has com­mit­ted, how­ev­er, to con­tin­ue serv­ing To­ba­go and ad­vo­cate on its be­half through his writ­ings and pub­lic ap­pear­ances.

Benoit said hav­ing been ac­cused of not do­ing things “I had hoped that Mar­tin George would have been able to take the reigns as he took it and start do­ing things that they said I was not do­ing right. If that had hap­pened that would have been fine, but he re­signed so what hap­pened?" he asked.

But the T&T Cham­ber has sig­nalled that the busi­ness of the or­gan­i­sa­tion must go on.

In an email to the Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee of the To­ba­go Cham­ber, the T&T Cham­ber ad­vised that there were two op­tions to ad­dress the sit­u­a­tion, the first op­tion was to con­tin­ue to hold meet­ings and choose a mem­ber of the Com­mit­tee to chair each meet­ing or to dis­solve the en­tire com­mit­tee and hold an ex­tra­or­di­nary gen­er­al meet­ing with the mem­ber­ship to reap­point a new man­age­ment com­mit­tee un­til the next an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing due in March 2019.

One Cham­ber of­fi­cial told Guardian Me­dia that the Com­mit­tee has to meet to de­ter­mine which of the two op­tions they will utilise, but op­tion one seemed the most vi­able at this time.

Benoit said with no chair­man or vice chair­man, the next per­son to call the meet­ing of the Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee is Sec­re­tary Na­tal­ie Ma­habir.