BWIA must meet conditionalities says PM

Prime Minister Patrick Manning continued to take a hard line on BWIA, stressing yesterday that if the national airline did not meet the conditionalities set by government for its financing, Government would allow it to go into liquidation.

“Let me made it clear, there are no sacred cows...We have said to BWIA ‘$116 million would be available to you under certain conditions, if you meet the conditions, you get the money’,” he stated. He added that Government admitted to BWIA that it was employing an “IMF-type arrangement”. He went on to say that it was before of the IMF conditions of the 1986-1991 period that the country was eventually put on a economically viable footing.

He was speaking at a post-Cabinet news conference at Whitehall. On statements by the unions that government was encouraging BWIA to break the law, Manning said he was not aware that the company was breaking the law if it reduced salaries. The Prime Minister recalled that the NAR Government cut salaries by 10 percent and removed cost of living allowances unilaterally. “Not that we agreed with it, but the Government of the day felt that was what it had to do,” he said.

Manning said as emotional as BWIA was to many Trinidadians and Tobagonians, including himself (“I love to fly with it”), “if you can’t afford it, you just can’t afford it”. He said government believed that the terms and conditions of employees of BWIA must be sustainable. He added that the viable plan which BWIA presented to the government contained the very proposals which government subsequently laid down as conditions as its funding.