CHRIS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN AT THE CULTURAL CENTRE

Sep 19, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

What was Chris Ram doing at the National Cultural Centre last Thursday afternoon when the President of Guyana met with policyholders of CLICO (Guyana) Limited, to inform them of the plans for the liquidation of the company?
I do accept that he is a legitimate policyholder, but Chris ought not to have been there. He had on the very day echoed in a letter to the media, some of the sentiments expressed in this column on Wednesday last. That column had questioned the need for the President to meet with the policyholders in light of the fact that the Court had appointed a liquidator, the Central Bank, and thus the question of liquidation was outside of the control of government and in the hands of the Bank, which was expected to perform the necessary technical evaluation of the health of the company and the gap between its assets and liabilities, as well as a way of deciding how the policyholders would be compensated.
Chris in his letter said as much, and supported the view that the President of Guyana really ought not to have been meeting with the policyholders since this was the proper function of the liquidator, which is the Bank of Guyana. That institution must now indicate to the people of Guyana, why it allowed the government to take the lead role in meeting the policyholders.
It was surprising to read Friday’s editorial in the Kaieteur News which indicated that Chris was at the meeting and ran into problems when he tried to ask a question. This would never have happened if he had stayed away and he ought not to have been there in the first place. This in no way should be construed as supporting the manner in which Chris was treated. That is inexcusable.
It is sad that Chris was belittled by someone young enough to be his son. Very sad indeed! But he should have known that this was coming, especially since one of the business icons of Guyana, Yesu Persaud was also tongue-whipped at another event not so long ago.
Chris should have stayed away from the National Cultural Centre last Thursday. If it was his view that the President should not have been meeting with policyholders, he being a policyholder, should not have been at that gathering during which the government sought to justify its handling of the entire affair – even without the benefit of a forensic investigation.
Of the 11,000-odd policyholders on the books of CLICO (Guyana) far below 5% turned up at the meeting. The vast majority of policyholders stayed away from the event, a serious statement to the government as to how they felt about the meeting. The vast majority of the policyholders by their absence may have been saying to the government the very thing that Chris has said in his letter to the media: it is the Bank of Guyana that should be meeting with us.
Kaieteur News has done a fantastic job on covering the entire CLICO debacle, but it needs to do some more work to find out why the attendance at the meeting was so poor. Obviously the organisers expected a full house, since they were insisting that only bona fide policyholders would be allowed in.
Based on the attendance alone, the meeting flopped. Many refused to be part of that political exercise; refused to be part of the window-dressing that was involved, and Chris ought, therefore, not to have been there.
Instead of going to the meeting, he should have been drafting an approach asking the Courts to halt the specific plans hatched and announced by the government, until such time as it is established to the satisfaction of the Courts that a proper evaluation of the company has been done and the various technical processes involved in liquidation are carried out in accordance with practices that are in the best interests of shareholders.
If he now moves in this direction, and if he tries to prevent NICIL from handling the payments to policyholders, he will make a lot of enemies and will be accused of trying to stymie the payments. But as the PNCR insisted through Court action in the 2006 elections, the results of those elections must be communicated through the proper channels, notwithstanding the fact that it would not change the overall results.
In the case of CLICO, the policyholders will eventually get what they were promised, but things have to be done in the right manner because when things start to be done in the wrong way, it opens the floodgates to more than just mistakes.

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