$20 m CL money paid for PNM 2007 election campaign?

The Sunday Express has published a copy of a $5 million cheque from CL Financial to the People's National Movement signed by Lawrence Duprey and other CL officials at a time when the group was in financial trouble.

The paper said its sources reported that the "conglomerate bankrolled the 2007 election campaign of the Patrick Manning-led PNM party to the tune of some $20 million."

The paper said according to its sources, much of the money paid for suppliers of goods and services such as printing fliers and tee shirts, renting tents and maxi-taxis, but the bulk of the cash was paid to advertising agencies for media activity.

The Express said some of it went directly to the party, including one made "directly to the People's National Movement from the group's insurance subsidiary, Clico, on June 28, 2007, for the generous sum of $5 million. It said the $5 million cheque was drawn from a Republic Bank-held account at Independence Square in Port of Spain, was endorsed less than a month before the November 5, 2007, vote by Rose Janierre, assistant party secretary and Linus Rogers, PNM elections officer."

The report added, "The $5 million Clico payout to the PNM's war chest was made at a time when the country's No1 insurance company had already been red-flagged with solvency issues, a statutory fund deficit of close to a billion dollars and what financial observers warned were dangerously excessive levels of inter-party transactions within the group.

"If the Manning government had any concerns about the holding company using the country's largest insurer as a lucrative little money machine, it not only kept its own counsel but it lined up at the feeding trough.

"In the middle of this interplay of politics and business stood Andre Monteil, the then group financial director of Duprey's $100 billion business behemoth, his No1 lieutenant, party treasurer of the incumbent PNM government and the PNM face of the corporate animal known as CL Financial."

The paper said Duprey's group spread a lot of wealth around the PNM in the last decade mainly through "Duprey's right hand man, Andre Monteil, who, until recently, was numbered among the party's most formidable power brokers."

It also said Monteil was "the corporate chieftain who operated within the context of loopholes that allowed the CL Group to conduct business as usual in the seemingly opaque world of deficient legislation and well outside the good governance expectations of the Central Bank.

"In his January 30, 2009, containment effort to rescue the floundering financial giant, Governor Ewart Williams complained that the Central Bank had been "stymied" by inadequate legislation from going after the rogue insurance company.

"Governor Williams said that for the last five years the Central Bank was forced to watch helplessly from the sidelines as the country's No1 insurer sailed ever closer to the edge.

The Express said its sources reported that CL was the single largest financier to the PNM's 2007 re-election campaign. It said "a former executive at the brokerage firm of CMMB, one of the distressed finance companies owned by the CL Financial Group, told the Sunday Express that in 2007 Monteil complained that CMMB was the only board he sat on that didn't give the PNM money."

In 2007, Monteil was chairman of the Home Mortgage Bank (HMB), Clico Investment Bank (CIB), the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) and the Education Facilities Co Ltd. He was also a member on the board of directors of the CCN Group, parent company of the Trinidad Express Newspapers, Home Construction Ltd (HCL) and Angostura Holdings Ltd.

The Express said a CCN spokesman told it that the media group made no donation to the PNM 2007 campaign or to any other party for that matter.

The paper also reported that while Duprey made such generous contributions to the PNm it got no favours in return and was in fact hounded and harrassed for his dealings with former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday.

Read the full story in the Sunday Express

Both Panday and the leader of the Congress of the People, Winston Dookeran, said their parties did not get any money from Duprey to help finance the 2007 general election.

Read the story by Camini Maraj