Sports and Youth Af­fairs Min­is­ter Phillip Watts has de­scribed the find­ings of a 2025 Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T (SporTT) in­ter­nal au­dit re­port in­to T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB) fund­ing as 'very, very se­ri­ous".

Ini­tial­ly, when con­tact­ed on Wednes­day by Guardian Me­dia, Min­is­ter Watts said he could not com­ment on any TTCB mat­ters be­cause he did not want to over­ride the Po­lice Ser­vice’s fraud in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

How­ev­er, Guardian Me­dia shared a copy of the in­ter­nal SporTT doc­u­ment with the min­is­ter af­ter he said he was not in­formed or briefed about its find­ings.

“They were hav­ing a good time. They had a good thing go­ing. It seems as though there was some sort of col­lu­sion. Let me talk to Ja­son (Williams - SporTT chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer) on this on Mon­day. This is very, very se­ri­ous,” he said af­ter read­ing the re­port.

In 2023, for­mer TTCB trea­sur­er Kiswah Chaitoo filed a po­lice re­port con­cern­ing $500,000 of miss­ing funds. He was re­moved from the board and barred.

In March 2025, SporTT chief ex­ec­u­tive Ja­son Williams re­ceived a re­port from a board-ap­point­ed com­mit­tee on fund­ing pro­vid­ed to the TTCB be­tween 2019 and 2023.

The au­dit com­mit­tee’s re­port found that the board re­ceived $14.8 mil­lion more than its orig­i­nal al­lo­ca­tions be­tween 2019 and 2023. The TTCB was, at first, al­lo­cat­ed $13.4 mil­lion, but even­tu­al­ly re­ceived $28.2 mil­lion in tax­pay­ers' mon­ey.

$4.8 mil­lion was al­lo­cat­ed to the TTCB in 2022, but the TTCB got $11.5 mil­lion, $6.7 mil­lion more.

In 2023, the bud­get was $2.33 mil­lion. The crick­et board col­lect­ed $11.7 mil­lion, $9.3 mil­lion more.

The Au­dit Com­mit­tee’s in­ves­ti­ga­tion found that there were dif­fer­ences in the amount of mon­ey list­ed by the TTCB on in­voic­es com­pared to the amounts of mon­ey it list­ed for the same event on sup­port­ing doc­u­ments like cheques and vouch­ers. Spe­cif­ic oc­cur­rences were flagged in 2020, 2021 and 2023.

In 2020, the TTCB re­ceived $298,500 to sup­port the de­vel­op­ment of women’s crick­et. The in­ves­ti­ga­tion found that "There was no ev­i­dence of pay­ments made to the clubs by TTCB."

SporTT gave the TTCB $153,000 for op­er­a­tional costs. More than $131,400 was un­ac­count­ed for. It was re­port­ed that on­ly “Sup­ports (doc­u­ments) for $21,585 were seen.”

In 2021, the board got $201,000 for prepa­ra­tions for the re­gion’s one-day crick­et com­pe­ti­tion, the CG In­sur­ance Su­per 50 Cup. The re­port found that there was no ev­i­dence of ver­i­fi­ca­tion and ap­proval of in­voic­es by the TTCB, and no ev­i­dence of pay­ment in­for­ma­tion seen (Cheque, pay­ment vouch­ers, re­ceipts from cus­tomers, ACH).

In 2023, due to the ab­sence of sup­port­ing doc­u­ments, no rec­on­cil­i­a­tions (the process of ver­i­fy­ing that two sets of records agree) were able to de­ter­mine how $776,000 was spent. These events in­clud­ed $184,800 for a crick­et acad­e­my and $218,625 for na­tion­al Un­der-15, U-17 and U-19 prepa­ra­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to Guardian Me­dia’s in­ves­ti­ga­tions, since 2014, the TTCB re­ceived more than $100 mil­lion in fund­ing for the board and T&T Red Force (which it man­ages) from SporTT, Crick­et West In­dies (CWI), NGC (Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny) and the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter’s Sport & Cul­ture Fund (OPM­SCF).

More than $53 mil­lion was in state fund­ing.

In 2017, an au­dit of NGC fund­ing to the TTCB found that at least $3 mil­lion of $13.3 mil­lion in fund­ing was mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed (spent or trans­ferred with­out nec­es­sary ap­proval).

The TTCB is al­so 15 post-event au­dits be­hind for the CWI, amount­ing to around $20 mil­lion in fund­ing.

Nonethe­less, ac­cord­ing to CWI’s fi­nan­cial records, the TTCB has re­ceived at least $54 mil­lion in fund­ing from CWI for the TTCB and Red Force T&T Lim­it­ed be­tween 2021 and 2024.