PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – The Trinidad and Tobago government says it intends to sell its 49 percent shareholding in the Colonial Life Insurance Company (CLICO) and will use the funds to ease the financial difficulties expected over the next few years
Finance Minister Colm Imbert, delivering the TT$59.7 billion (One TT dollar=US$0.16 cents) national budget to Parliament on Monday, said that the regional insurance company is not considered to be of “strategic importance to the government.
“Its divestment will earn several billion dollars in revenue for the government to see us through the financial difficulties of the next few years,” Imbert said, telling legislators that the government had not been fully repaid for the bailout to CLICO.
“I have noticed a false narrative circulating that the government has been repaid all that it is due for the 2009 and 2010 CLICO bailout. This is entirely untrue “.
Imbert said that the CLICO bailout involved not only the insurance company but also the bailout of CL Financial (the parent company) and its subsidiaries, including CLICO Investment Bank, British American Insurance (BAICO), and Republic Bank, among others.
“Far from being fully repaid, the government is still owed over at least a further TT$13 billion. I want to clarify that we are still owed TT$13 billion,” Imbert said.
In 2017, the government was granted permission to appoint provisional liquidators to preserve CL Financial’s assets as it sought to recover a TT$15 billion debt left from the 2009 bailout of the conglomerate’s insurance subsidiaries, CLICO and BAICO.
In September 2020, Imbert said that, after a decade and multiple assessments, the government’s bailout of CL Financial and CLICO had cost taxpayers TT$30 billion.
Imbert indicated that the debt was initially thought to be approximately TT$15 billion. Still, when the Ministry of Finance went to court with the liquidation, “it was TT$23 billion-plus, and having done, the final account is $30 billion.
and then 