T&T Parliament to debate no confidence in Finance Minister

The Trinidad &Tobago House of Representatives will on Friday debate a resolution of no confidence in finance minister Karen Nunez-Teshiera.

Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar has filed the motion, which is included in the Order Paper for Friday's sitting.

The motion states:

"WHEREAS the Minister of Finance has conducted herself both within and outside of the House contrary to the tenets of transparency and accountability regarding her interests in CL Financial Limited prior to, during and subsequent to negotiations between the government and that company over government’s intervention in the affairs of the company;

"AND WHEREAS the said conduct of the Minister of Finance has eroded the confidence of the public in the Minister’s ability to administer over the finances of the nation in the best interest of the public;

"BE IT RESOLVED that this Honorable House express its loss of confidence in Mrs. Karen Nunez Teshiera as Minister of Finance of Trinidad and Tobago; and call upon the Prime Minister to take steps to have the appointment of the Minister of Finance revoked forthwith."

It's unlikely that the motion would achieve its desired result primarily because of the strong majority of the governing People's National Movement (PNM) has in the House and Prime Minister Patrick Manning's endorsement of the minister.

Nunez-Teschiera has been under fire since she announced a rescue package to help out CL Financial. Persad-Bissessar has been leading the charge based on information reported in the media that Nunez-Tesheira might be in a conflict of interest by presiding over an aid package for CL Financial while she was a shareholder of the conglomerate.

Nunez-Tesheira denies any wrongdoing and has said she didn't mention her CL shareholding in Parliament but had declared it to the Integrity Commission. But Persad-Bissessar told the media earlier this month her checks and those made by reporters showed that no such declaration was made by the minister.

The minister has dismissed the issue of a conflict of interest and made it clear that she is not about to quit. Prime Minister Patrick Manning has also said he saw nothing wrong about the matter and has said he has confidence in her.

Documents from CLICO Investment Bank (CIB) show that Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira closed two US dollar accounts with the bank on December 31, 2008, before they were scheduled to mature later this year.

CIB is one of four CL Financial businesses that benefited from a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout approved by the Cabinet last month.Nunez-Tesheira told Parliament on February 2 that she took the money out of a CIB account that had matured. However the docments show that Nunez-Tesheira paid a 3.5 per cent penalty for closing two accounts at CIB worth a total of US$48,549.91.

They were due to mature on April 30, 2009 and August 13, 2009 respectively. She closed one account at US$37,549.45 and the other at US$11,076.34, including interest. Persad-Bissessar suggested that the minister had access to privileged information about CIB, which led to her making withdrawals from her accounts with the bank and Caribbean Money Market Brokers (CMMB), another CL subsidiary, late last year.

Here is what the official Hansard records the minister as saying regarding a CIB account:

"On December 31, I withdrew an account which had matured on December 31, 2008. You go and check it because when you were making your accusations, I wanted to ensure that I was accurate on the information, and I called to get all the information that I had on every withdrawal I made in relation to those two institutions."

Nunez Teshiera claimed that she did not realise that she was breaking the despoits although she signed for the transactions. She said she was not informed by anyone at CIB that she was, in fact, breaking the accounts.

"The request was first made verbally. In that initial discussion, no one said to me that what I was doing I was breaking an account," Nunez-Tesheira told the media.