Central Bank says it’s open to Clico transparency

PORT-OF-SPAIN: The Central Bank issued a statement saying that it is committed to co-operating with the Commission of Enquiry into Clico and has every intention of being open and transparent in this matter. 

The bank says that as such, it is providing the commission with significant amounts of information in its possession covering several years prior to the Clico crisis. It added that since it exercised its emergency powers on January 31st and February 13th, 2009 to assume control of Clico, CIB and British American, it had taken all steps it considered necessary to protect the interests and preserve the rights of their depositors, policyholders and creditors, including commissioning a number of expert reports in order to pursue civil proceedings on the companies’ behalf and for the director of public prosecutions to determine whether there should be criminal proceedings.

The bank says it welcomes the establishment of the commission.

However the bank says it has a duty not to make any disclosures that would jeopardize civil proceedings, and by extension possibly affect depositors and policy holders getting justice from the courts. 

It added that it has carefully considered whether, in order to assist the commission, it can nevertheless release any of the reports without doing undue damage to the policyholders’ and depositors’ interests in the civil proceedings.