We reproduce below an Editorial from the Trinidad Express commenting on the latest episode of Trinidad & Tobago's finance minister's attempt to justify her actions in her handling of the CL bailout."On the basis of her statement in the House of Representatives last Friday, the Minister of Finance has decided to use defiance as the way out of a situation in which she has lost tremendous public respect and goodwill.
"The Minister sought to justify actions which she took ostensibly for the sake of saving deposit holders and policy holders who stood to lose huge sums of money with the near collapse of the CL Financial empire.
"Putting this objective in front, the Minister continued to defend against those allegations that she committed a conflict of interest on the one hand and also that she was less than candid in a disclosure in Parliament.
"In a highly legalistic presentation in which she went over at length the purport of the bills she took to Parliament to amend the Central Bank Act and the Insurance Act, the Minister repeated much of the detail about what these amendments were designed to do.
"She was at pains, as well, to describe her actions as not on her own behalf, but on behalf of the Cabinet of which she is a vital part, and therefore on behalf of the people of Trinidad and Tobago.
"Applying a self-interested definition on the issue of conflict of interest, however, the Minister refused to consider that she had a conflict, in deciding to sit as part of the team which designed the Memorandum of Understanding with the principals at CL Financial.
"Such a conflict arose from the simple fact that the Minister was a shareholder at CL Financial. That the Minister chose not to make this fact known to the Parliament and thereby to the country even when on February 2 she was forced to disclose that she had withdrawn money from Clico Investment Bank at the end of December remains a grave error of judgement.
"But according to the text of the law regarding integrity in public life, once the Minister sat in on discussions in this matter knowing she was a shareholder in the company this constitutes a conflict. Whether or not as the Minister kept insisting on Friday, she may have sought to do anything that may have been to her direct benefit remains immaterial.
"On top of this, the Minister further mis-stepped when in that statement in Parliament she declared that the withdrawal of the deposits at CIB had been as a result of their maturation.
"Her statement never mentioned the fact that the deposits had been "rolled over" as she was to claim after the fact, when this newspaper subsequently broke the story of how the Minister had applied to the bank to break them.
"She remains gravely wounded, with her image severely tarnished. Her continued retention as a member of the Cabinet is therefore another significant error of judgement, both for her and for the Prime Minister, whose stated confidence in her is at variance with that of a sizeable segment of the population.
"Moreover, both Mrs Nunez-Tesheira and her ministerial supporters are "getting on'' as if this is simply a political issue between the Government and the Opposition. It is not. It is a public issue of ethics, morality and, indeed law.
"By their stance they have put paid to any lingering notion that they have even the slightest regard for any of the three. As such they are setting the population an egregious example.
"Shame on them!"
-Reproduced from the Trinidad Express, Monday March 30, 2009
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