PM : BWIA/LIAT TO MERGE

A BWIA/LIAT merger is expected to be endorsed by the Cabinet today at a special meeting at 10 am today to finalise Government’s position on BWIA.

“Not that our position is in any doubt,” Prime Minister Patrick Manning stated at a post-Cabinet news conference at Whitehall yesterday. He said in principle a decision has been taken to form one airline- a regional airline, “essentially out of BWIA and LIAT”. A technical team will be established to determine the configuration of that airline “and the best strategy to pursue to get that configuration from where we are today”, Manning stated. Manning said the Government never really had a position on whether BWIA was of strategic importance or not. It came up for discussion, but it never really determined the question, even though in the interim, Government divested its shares in BWIA.

Manning recalled that in 1989 when his convention address was being prepared, a big argument broke out on the night before the convention, as to whether BWIA was of strategic importance. “At 11 that night, we argued it back and forth...we never resolved the question-whether BWIA is of strategic importance or not. But we have been pursuing a course of action on the assumption that BWIA was not of strategic importance. Our meeting in Barbados — at which the Prime Ministers of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St Vincent and the Deputy Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda were present- considered that a regional airline was of strategic importance”. “ And,” he stressed”,for the first time in 15 years the government of Trinidad and Tobago is closer to an answer to the question of whether BWIA is of strategic importance or not”.