(Trinidad Express) Lisa Agard has been fired as chief executive officer of Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago with immediate effect.
The unexpected development followed calls for her removal following what many felt was TSTT’s mishandling of communication following an early October cyberattack.
She was handed the letter of termination and a cheque at her desk at TSTT’s headquarters in Port of Spain yesterday.
Agard, TSTT’s first woman CEO, had been at the helm of the organisation since she replaced former CEO Ronald Walcott in September 2020.
The notice of Agard’s removal came around 4.02 p.m. as the TSTT board announced the appointment of Kent Western as its acting CEO.
“Mr Western is the holder of an MBA in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Anglia Ruskin University, an MBA in Telecommunications from the Telecoms Academy in the United Kingdom, and a postgraduate certificate in General Management. He brings a wealth of leadership experience to the position, having held senior executive roles in the local, regional, and international telecommunications industry, always with a focus on commercial operations and customer experience,” a media release from TSTT stated.
Western, who was previously employed at Digicel, served as TSTT’s general manager, Customer Experience and Marketing.
Contacted for comment on the development yesterday, TSTT’s chairman Sean Roach told the Express:
“It is not our policy to discuss any matter involving company personnel publicly. I can however say that the former CEO’S departure was in accordance with the terms and conditions of her contract. As chairman of the board of TSTT, I would like to wish her well in all her future endeavours.”
Attempts to contact Agard for comment were unsuccessful up to last night.
Apology for ineffective communication
Agard’s dismissal came on the first official working day after the long Divali holiday weekend and followed her address last Friday at a virtual TSTT investors’ call where she apologised to the company’s customers whose data was stolen by cyber criminals.
She also expressed regret for the way the company handled its communication in the aftermath of the cyberattack.
Over the weekend TSTT also took out a full-page newspaper advertisement with Agard’s apology.
“In our haste to address the cyber problem there were some things that we could have done better. We were so busily focused on identifying the problem, containing it and restoring full capability to serve our customers that we neglected perhaps to communicate effectively with them,’ Agard said in response to a question from an investor.
“This was not done with malice but rather from a place of ensuring that the most accurate information was communicated at the time it became known,’ she said.
On October 9, at 4.18 p.m., TSTT was the target of a malware incursion.
However, the public was only notified of the cyberattack on October 27 when international hackers, RansomExx, announced that they infected the company with ransomware and stole as much as six gigabytes of its data, including names, e-mail addresses, national ID numbers, phone numbers and ‘a lot of other sensitive data’.
TSTT addressed the cyberattack for the first time in a release issued on October 30, downplaying the scope of the breach.
