Sell CLF, then what?

CLF wasn’t established overnight. “Founded as an insurance company, Colonial Life Insurance Company (Clico), by Cyril Duprey, it was expanded into a diversified company by his nephew Lawrence Duprey.

CL Financial then became one of the largest local conglomerates in the region, encompassing over 65 companies in 32 countries worldwide with total assets exceeding US$100 billion.” Has the Government and public sector inefficiency the ability to re-establish or surpass CLF’s accomplishments? How many companies will the Government replace CLF with? The Government can’t run Petrotrin, TSTT , nor HDC right.

What will be the global scope of CLF’s replacement companies if that is Government’s plan? When will those companies roll out and become profitable? If the Government isn’t going to succeed CLF with something superior, what is its motive in now seeking to dump CLF on the open market after eight years? Is CLF now no longer too big to fail, or was it set up in 2009 to appear as if failing? OK, sell CL Financial. Then what? The Government must lay out the plan for what it intends doing if it succeeds in selling off CLF. Lay out what the nation should look forward to after that is done. Present the future visionary plan. How much money would a CLF fire sale put in the Government’s hands. What would the Government do with the money? Spend it on another overpriced white cow cricket complex or some more tall buildings? If it got the best price, say, $30 billion with interest at four percent, would the Government use the cash to write off $31.2 billion of the $124 billion national debt? What’s the move after that? What would the Government to do generate forex? Lay out the benefits for future generations.

The Government has no income- earning ideas. It has no plan for diversifying away from mining and selling the nation’s non-renewable raw energy cheap. Thus it has no diversified portfolio for earning the country income. It hasn’t learned how to do this from eight years of running Clico because it replaced the brains that know how to earn diversified income with bureaucratic lackeys.

Historically, governments have always sought to sell State assets to make up shortfalls in Budget allocations. This is a new page in which the Government may have surreptitiously gotten control of a multibillion dollar private company and is now unrolling its motive for doing so. The Government saw CLF as short-term financial insurance against prolonged low energy prices.

The pattern of governments throughout has been to buy things for more than they’re worth and sell them for less than they’re worth. That business system is why TT is $124 billion in debt. Some examples are the controversial $240 million Caroni Racing Complex in which Johnny O’Halloran had been involved in the 1970s, the $1.2 billion Lara Cricket Complex of the 2000s, the failed $2 billion Petrotrin gas-to-liquids plant of the 2000s.

So usurping control of CLF in 2009 under the pretence of seeking to save the conglomerate with tax dollars and now seeking legal backing to sell CLF for small change, to preferred buyers, is Government’s ballpark business lineament.

B JOSEPH via email