Regional News

(BBC) – Liat’s owners are congratulating themselves for keeping the airline in Caribbean hands and out of Sir Allen Stanford’s.

DALLAS (Reuters) – Latin American investors in the unraveling financial empire of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford do not want their names published for fear they could be targeted by criminals, a lawyer said.

(Trinidad Express) – Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira says that the Clico Investment Bank (CIB) accounts which she closed on December 31 last year, before they matured later this year, had actually matured previously and were “rolled over”.

(Trinidad Exoress) NASSAU – FirstCaribbean International Bank has called in a nearly $500,000 debt owed by Clico Bahamas, further eroding policyholders’ chances of fully recovering their money tied up in the troubled insurance firm, The Nassau Guardian can confirm.

(Trinidad Express)- The names of a magistrate and police prosecutor were written on paper and stuffed into a powder-filled bottle and left outside the Princes Town Magistrates’ Court on Monday.

SAO PAULO, (Reuters) – Brazil’s economy had its  worst showing in more than a decade in the last quarter of  2008, shrinking a larger-than-expected 3.6 percent as the  global financial crisis took a heavy toll on Latin America’s  biggest country.

(Nassau Guardian) NASSAU, The Bahamas – Bahamian professionals, religious leaders, businesses, churches and two government entities – Bahamasair and the Broad-casting Corporation Of The Bahamas – collectively have US$23 million in annuities tied up in CLICO Bahamas and it remains unclear how much, if any, of that money will be recovered as the company is in liquidation.

VIENNA, March 10 (Reuters) – A United Nations drive to cut  supply and demand for illegal drugs has shown no progress  globally in the decade since it was started, a European  Commis-sion report said yesterday.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General  Ban Ki-moon and former U.S. President Bill Clinton visited  Haiti yesterday and urged the Caribbean state to use  international backing to haul itself out of grinding poverty.

(Trinidad Express) Half of the Cabinet has some type of an investment “portfolio”, “an annuity or something” with Colonial Life Insurance Co (CLICO), a subsidiary of the CL Financial Group, which received a multi-billion-dollar bailout from the State, says Prime Minister Patrick Manning.

(Jamaica Gleaner) Divi-sional commander for the St James police, Superintendent Maurice Robinson, is appealing for calm following a quadruple murder in the parish on Sunday.

HOUSTON, (Reuters) – The Houston office of the FBI is  seeking to identify victims in its criminal fraud investigation of  Stanford Financial Group and its affiliated companies, the agency  said yesterday.

(Trinidad Guardian) Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira has presided over the billion-dollar bail-out of the CL Financial group, even as she herself has owned shares in the conglomerate, Guardian investigations have revealed.

(Trinidad Express) Non-performing loans on the books of the state-impounded CL Financial-owned Clico Investment Bank (CIB) could account for over 20 per cent, significantly more than the industry standard of two-to-three per cent, sources close to the bank have disclosed.

(BBC) The president of the Caribbean Development Bank, Compton Bourne, said Friday that the problems facing conglomerate CL Financial point to a serious gap in the region’s regulatory system.

DAR ES SALAAM,  (Reuters) – Developing countries  could face a financing gap of $270-$700 billion — equivalent to  the latest U.S.

(Jamaica Gleaner) – Tragedy struck at a basic school in the Tucker-Irwin area of St James on Thursday afternoon when a little girl died after an abandoned piano in a schoolyard fell on her.

Trinidad Express) – A 33-year-old man who raped and sodomised his 73-year-old mother was caught by police officers around 3 am on Thursday.

(Trinidad Express) – The Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT) has begun investigations to determine whether the erroneous reports of the “discovery of children in a container on the port within Trinidad and Tobago was public mischief on the part of the broadcasting stations involved”.

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has taken over a eucalyptus tree farm run by Ireland’s Smurfit Kappa, his latest move on foreign companies as he tightens his grip on the farm and food sectors.