(Trinidad Express) Former finance minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira on Thursday gave an “emotional and expressive” account of the reasons behind her decision to break a CLICO Investment Bank (CIB) fixed deposit weeks before a billion dollar bailout of CL Financial was brokered.
Nunez-Tesheira took the witness stand at the commission of enquiry into the collapse of CL Financial and the Hindu Credit Union (HCU) for the second consecutive day yesterday.
She was cross-examined by Queen’s Counsel Andrew Mitchell, legal representative for former CL Financial executive chairman, Lawrence Duprey.
Nunez-Tesheira’s husband, Russell Tesheira, was an insurance executive at CL Financial subsidiary CLICO before his death on April 14, 2004.
Nunez-Tesheira inherited the CIB fixed deposit from her deceased husband. Her father was a consultant at CLICO. Nunez-Tesheira’s brother and uncle were also former CLICO employees.
During cross-examination on Wednesday by Terrence Bharath, attorney for the CLICO Policyholders Group, Nunez-Tesheira said she and her sister had broken fixed deposits at the financial institution on December 30, 2009.
Nunez-Tesheira told Bharath the fact that the fixed deposits were broken weeks before the State’s intervention in the conglomerate was a “coincidence”.
Mitchell yesterday probed Nunez-Tesheira on the issue.
MITCHELL: One of the things that is clear is although you did not know about the EFPAs (Executive Flexible Premium Annuities), although you were not well sighted to the details of the business of CL Financial, by December 2008 you had concerns about CIB and decided that the high interest rates must have meant high risk and therefore you were going to take your money out.
NUNEZ-TESHEIRA: Are you talking about my personal business?
MITCHELL: I’m trying to paint a picture of Karen Nunez-Tesheira not just a politician, the minister of finance, but also mixing some of those personal issues in with the events as they unwound in January and February 2009.
Nunez-Tesheira then outlined the entire sequence of events that led to her decision to eventually break her fixed deposit.
NUNEZ-TESHEIRA: Well if I have to answer you in terms of the enquiry, my concerns about CLICO went back to about 2003 and the reason for that is I knew that Mr Duprey wanted to terminate my husband’s services. I was aware of that because among other things 17 of the agency managers signed a letter to Mr Duprey saying they heard rumours that he wanted to dismiss my husband and my husband came home, showed me the letter and told me that 17 agency managers met at the Oval and wrote to Mr Duprey to express their unhappiness about it.
“My understanding from my husband was whilst I did not know the details of the products, he was very unhappy with the way in which CLICO was going. He was very unhappy about the fact that all the persons that had worked all their lives in the entity were being dismissed or terminated. He was unhappy with the way he saw Mr Duprey conducting the business, in particular that he seemed to be taking the money, pushing the agents and pushing them to get cash for him to invest it in his own private affairs.
“I could recall on the weekend before my husband died, because he was going to have an operation, he said to me if they want him to leave he was very happy to leave. He would be no part of what was taking place in CLICO…so I am putting it in context so that in relation to my relationship with CLICO since you have put it on the table, I am telling you that on the death of my husband, I had nothing to do with CLICO and CLICO had nothing to do with me.
“It took very little, very, very little to persuade me to terminate any relationship with CLICO as a company. I did not agree with the way they were conducting their business; I did not agree with the way they treated my husband; I did not agree with the person who worked there for 30 years being thrown out. I remember persons who gave their whole life to that company being summarily dismissed from the company. I did not like it.
“In December when I decided to take out my money it was against that backdrop of my own personal feelings about CLICO in addition to the fact that when my mother was alive, my older sister, who is a banker, tried to persuade my mother to take her money out of CIB. She said to my mother ‘high returns equal high risk’. My father was not in good health and my mother was in the driver’s seat, because of that we could not persuade her.
“When my mother passed away at the end of August 2008, my older sister who is the banker had a power of attorney over my father’s assets and my sister was the one dealing with my father’s assets.
“My sister and I have the emails to prove it, sent out to all the members of the family because my parents had much more money in CIB. I had very little in CIB, it was my parents who had the money and by the way they qualify as third party so they would have gotten back their money so for all the persons who say that I benefitted, my parents would have gotten back their money in any event.
“At the end of September/October 2009, my sister wrote all the members of the family telling them she wanted to convert all my father’s assets into safe treasury bonds. I did not respond because I was the minister of finance and I did not want anybody to say I was giving anybody financial advice so I did not respond.
“So in the context of me being the executor of my parents estate, in the context of my sister having called me and expressed a concern, in the context of my own personal dissatisfaction at CLICO, in the context that I never invested in that company, I wanted nothing to do with CLICO, CIB or any of those agencies. It took very little for me to decide to terminate my relationship with that company. That is the reason and now you have heard the story.