Last week’s ap­point­ment of a new board at Cli­co, the in­sur­ance com­pa­ny that was saved from ex­tinc­tion by a $5 bil­lion State bailout in Sep­tem­ber 2009, may be a sig­nal that the Gov­ern­ment is about to close the book on T&T’s largest fi­nan­cial res­cue pack­age.

Or it may be an in­di­ca­tion that this coun­try’s Cab­i­net has no in­ten­tion of re­leas­ing its stran­gle­hold on Cli­co, or its nom­i­nal par­ent, CL Fi­nan­cial, which was placed in­to liq­ui­da­tion by the ac­tions of Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert in 2018.

The un­cer­tain­ty over the Gov­ern­ment’s pol­i­cy on these two im­por­tant com­pa­nies is due to the fact that Mr Im­bert has pushed the all-im­por­tant is­sue of bring­ing this mat­ter to an end com­plete­ly off the pub­lic pol­i­cy radar.

The last time Mr Im­bert men­tioned CL Fi­nan­cial/Cli­co in a bud­get speech was in his pre­sen­ta­tion of the 2021 fis­cal pack­age on Oc­to­ber 5, 2020.

Three years ago, he said, “The CL Fi­nan­cial/Cli­co stress is at an ad­vanced stage of res­o­lu­tion as we are in the fi­nal stages of con­clud­ing the re­pay­ment oblig­a­tions to Gov­ern­ment from the bailout of Cli­co, Cli­co In­vest­ment Bank as well as the liq­ui­da­tion of CL Fi­nan­cial.”

The main rea­son the CL Fi­nan­cial/Cli­co is­sue de­serves to be on the front­burn­er of pub­lic pol­i­cy is be­cause those two en­ti­ties still owe the Gov­ern­ment bil­lions of dol­lars.

Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from for­mer Op­po­si­tion MP Su­ru­jrat­tan Ram­bachan in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on No­vem­ber 27, 2019, Mr Im­bert said a to­tal of $23.1 bil­lion was spent on the CL Fi­nan­cial bailout, not in­clud­ing “oth­er costs such as ad­vis­er and le­gal fees in­curred by the Gov­ern­ment”.

Of that amount, ac­cord­ing to the Fi­nance Min­is­ter, the debt owed to the Gov­ern­ment by Cli­co was $18.05 bil­lion, of which the in­sur­ance com­pa­ny had paid close to $15 bil­lion as at Sep­tem­ber 30, 2019.

The for­mer ex­ec­u­tive chair of Cli­co, Claire Gomez-Miller, told Guardian Me­dia last Tues­day that Cli­co still owed the Gov­ern­ment $1.1 bil­lion, which is ac­cru­ing in­ter­est at a rate of 4.75 per cent per an­num.

The state­ments by Mr Im­bert in No­vem­ber 2019 and by Ms Gomez-Miller last week point to the like­li­hood that CL Fi­nan­cial’s cur­rent debt to Gov­ern­ment is up­ward of $6 bil­lion, and more than $8 bil­lion if all the ad­vis­er and le­gal fees in­curred since 2009 are in­clud­ed.

To put the CL Fi­nan­cial is­sue in­to per­spec­tive, Mr Im­bert es­ti­mat­ed that T&T’s deficit for the 2024 fis­cal year would be $5.2 bil­lion. Clear­ly, that means the Gov­ern­ment could elim­i­nate the 2024 fis­cal deficit in its en­tire­ty if it were to act proac­tive­ly to re­cov­er the CL Fi­nan­cial debt in the cur­rent fis­cal year.

The ques­tion is: Why would the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance—aid­ed and abet­ted in his si­lence by the of­fi­cial Op­po­si­tion—not pub­licly ad­dress the is­sue of the CL Fi­nan­cial debt and its re­la­tion­ship to T&T’s 2024 fis­cal deficit?

Giv­en the sig­nif­i­cance of this is­sue, it be­hooves Mr Im­bert to make an im­me­di­ate pub­lic state­ment out­lin­ing the ex­act size of the CL Fi­nan­cial debt and the steps Gov­ern­ment has tak­en, or will take, to re­cov­er same.

He should al­so up­date the pub­lic on the sta­tus of Mar­itime Fi­nan­cial’s le­gal mat­ter against the Cen­tral Bank re­gard­ing Cli­co’s tra­di­tion­al in­sur­ance port­fo­lio. And there is need for in­for­ma­tion on the dis­po­si­tion of Cli­co’s shares in Methanol Hold­ings In­ter­na­tion­al Ltd.