Keith Rowley verbatim in support of HCU

Keith Rowley made a case Monday for the Government to bail out the Hindu Credit Union (HCU) in the same manner that it is seeking to help the CL financial group that is now in deep financial trouble. Rowley made the appeal in the debate on two financial bills in Parliament that require oposition support to pass. A verbatim Hansard record is published below:

Mr. Speaker, another thing too, I do not know why I find myself in this all the time, but every example I look for is an example that I am familiar with. A few years ago, I was at Balisier House when it came through the ether that there was to be a demonstration outside Balisier House.

The demonstration was very vociferous and there were a lot of threats and carrying on. It was the Hindu Credit Union people who came to Balisier House to accost the Minister of Finance who had indicated some interest in investigating what was being said about the Hindu Credit Union. The reaction of the Hindu Credit Union was to bully the Government, and the Government backed away from going in there to see what happened.

Well, in recent months, we have read all about what was going on in there and, at the end of the day, the Hindu Credit Union crashed. So it can be said that the people who ran the Hindu Credit Union jumped, waved and misbehaved, and when the party was over, poor people and not so poor people, who had their money in there, lost their money.

They have been calling for help and saying that it was not their fault, and looking to their Government. We have not acted yet on that. Up comes this situation, and the Prime Minister tells us today about somebody in Clico who was trying to get somebody to use policyholders' statutory fund money to bring it into an account to pay bonuses.

That brings me to the point: If that is true and if, as the Prime Minister said, it was management misconduct at Clico that brought us to where we are today, how as a government of all the people can we, in all conscience, say that we are going to bail out Clico and not bail out the HCU people? [Desk thumping] How can we do that?

Let us not mix words, especially since there are those who are prepared, correctly or incorrectly, to cast the HCU issue in ethnic considerations. A government has to look after all the people. [Desk thumping] If people feel aggrieved—and I am saying this to my colleagues on the other side—you might be right economically, you might be right financially, but if in the face of what we are called upon to do now, we do not take on board the grievances of those persons who can rightly claim that they too should have been protected by the State, then it does not matter how the Government couches it, we are going to have a lot of people out there who will feel hard done by a government that did not come to their relief when, in fact, it was not all their fault; even though they were outside Balisier House making noise.

To the extent that they see the Government's inaction or lack of help in the context of their ethnicity, it would be a problem that would last for a long, long time. I will tell you worse than that. When they hear that they were asking for $40 million or $100 million, in some arrangement with the Government, and the Government failed to give it, and they see on television an admission from the Chairman of UDeCott that he and two of his board members sat in the quiet of their room and awarded a $368 million contract to a three-week old company, when nobody could say who the company belonged to, but they got a contract for $368 million under strange circumstances, when the people see that, they would say, "So different strokes for different folks; we could lose our cacada, which could have been saved by $160 million, with all kinds of justification coming as to how wrong it is in economic sense, but people who feel that they have the right connections and they have the right backing, could do something like that.”

A contractor could have in his hands right now $100 million of Government money unsecured, come from the same source and, at the end of the day, let me put it this way, if we bail out the people at Hindu Credit Union, you are bailing them out with their money. If we bail out the people at Clico, we are bailing them out with their money.

It might very well be that the people who are getting money out of UDeCott, were taking our money and going somewhere with it. That is fair? [Desk thumping] That cannot be right.

I want to say something to my colleagues on the other side. We seem to have a knack, in recent times, of making enemies; politics is about making friends. We cannot fight down the construction industry; we cannot fight down the Hindu Credit Union; we cannot fight down the church; fight down the Opposition; fight down Tobagonians; a day of reckoning will come when we have to ask somebody in this country to vote for us. "Who we going to?"