Caption: AG John Jeremie: T&T Parliament

‘… spending money on lawyers, billions of dollars on lawyers, and not having people check boxes, or putting one police officer to watch a box’ – John Jeremie

GOVERNEMNT says it’s ending the civil matters involving the collapsed conglomerate CL Financial Group after indicating that billions of dollars had been spent on attorney fees.

Attorney General John Jeremie in a statement to Parliament on Friday, told legislators that the Kamla Persad-Bissessar administration had decided to end the decades old probe that included a legal “feeding frenzy” even as a “joke” investigation took place.

Jeremie, who laid the Sir Anthony Colman report into the failure of CL Financial in Parliament, said he had been tasked with deciding the way forward and “whether to continue this decades-long joke of an investigation, because that is what it was, spending money on lawyers, billions of dollars on lawyers, and not having people check boxes, or putting one police officer to watch a box.

“What do I do? Well, as guardian of the public interest and having consulted with the Honourable Prime Minister, I have to say that we are not able to continue to spend hard resources, government resources.

“And we are not able to authorise and to allow for the spending on professional services to persons who are sometimes golfers but who are always very wealthy, move in various parts of the world. Some of us live next door to the Governor General of Barbados.”

He said that while criminal proceedings were fully the remit of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), any interaction with the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, which supervises financial institutions, was the remit of the finance minister.

“I can, however, end civil proceedings. And I propose to do so now, in a cost-effective manner, having regard to the fact the State has commenced some of these proceedings and might be required to meet some reasonable cost to exit the proceedings.”

Jeremie told legislators that it was an unenviable task to lay the Coleman report and that the collapse of the insurance giant, Colonial Life Insurance Company (CLICO), a subsidiary of CL Financial was due to unconscionable action by his predecessors and had occurred some 17 years ago.

CLICO collapsed in 2009 and on January 30, 2009, the People’s National Movement (PNM) government at the time announced a bailout of CL Financial—the parent company of CLICO—following a massive liquidity crisis. The collapse was attributed to excessive related-party transactions, high-risk investments, and a sharp decline in asset prices.

The Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago assumed control of the company to manage the crisis bit it relinquished control of CLICO on December 1, 2022, after a long restructuring and repayment process with CLICO paying off a TT$17.3 billion debt.

Jeremie said the former government had spent TT$28 billion on rescuing the CL Financial group and “to date, however, somewhere in the vicinity of about three to  four billion dollars over and above that TT$28 billion, have been spent on matters relating to the collapse of CLICO”.

Jeremie said his two past predecessors had irresponsibly engaged attorneys and accountants over the decades, but then stopped paying them in some cases since 2022.

“I am not referring to a couple of thousand dollars here and there. I am not referring to some hundreds of thousands of dollars. I am speaking of close to half a billion dollar,” he told Parliament, adding that the exact figures will be sent to him.

He said almost TT$400 million had been paid to Deloitte and Touche, which he had not hired, questioning aloud that that “not a single person” had been charged with criminal offences arising out of the collapse of  CL Financial.

Jeremie said the billions of dollars paid to attorneys  did not even take into account the liquidators’ costs and that the citizenry had not benefited from that.

He said what was also strange about this situation was that if the prime minister or any other legislator suffered a burglary, five police officers would visit and investigate, yet not for this report.

“Do you know what? This report, which chronicles the largest financial fraud in this country, do you know how many people are investigating this matter? “No more police officers than three, and in some cases one, and on very few occasions none,”  Jeremie said, adding “the report that I lay before Parliament today, itself came at a cost of approximately TT$150 million.

“It has never seen the light of day,” he said, adding that no trace of the report could be found in the Attorney General’s office, President’s office or the office of a bald man from west Trinidad who had once dubbed certain people “dogs”.

Jeremie mulled the evidence accompanying the report including tens of millions of emails, plus financial accounting records, forensic analysis proving numerous complex cross-border transactions, 6,414 pieces of electronic evidence and 1,650 hard-copy boxes of which he said, “God alone knows what’s in those boxes.”

Jeremie said Colman had recommended to call the police. “He goes on to talk about a Ponzi scheme and the like.” (CMC)