Former minister in the Ministry of Finance under the last PNM administration Mariano Browne said his government appointed “the best of the best” in the business world on the board of Caribbean Airlines (CAL). “Not anybody with any party card but people like CEO of Neal & Massy Arthur Lok Jack and Robert Riley, an engineer with BP/Amoco,” he said. Browne, in a telephone interview, said CAL’s former board comprised top entrepreneurs with a nose for making money and not political appointees because an airline had to be run on commercial principles.
He said a large sum of cash and methodology were left by the last CAL board but there had been a deviation. “The last board left US$150 million and methodology to go forward. The board and the company have to be managed in a particular way, but there has been a deviation from this methodology.” Asked if CAL, which has reportedly lost $800 million, is likely to break even by 2014 as the company anticipated, Browne said: “Not on the basis on which it is operating at present. “Not until they fix the two key areas of governance and management. Governance has to do with strategy and management has to do with the operation of the company.”
He said the overall responsibility for a company was governance. “They can say anything but they can’t solve anything until they solve these two problems, even if they have a restructuring plan. “CAL/BWIA have been restructured so many times and they are restructuring it again.” Asked about the airline giving out free tickets, Browne said this was not going to help the airline but was not going to break it either. “The free tickets issue is a governance issue,” he said. “This tells how you are going to run the airline in other areas.” Former finance minister in the PNM administration Conrad Enill held a similar view on the composition of CAL’s board. “Our government’s position was: leave them alone, and they were doing well. “We knew CAL required business rather than political skill. So our position was put business people on the board and let them do the job.”
Enill said it appeared CAL had gone back to the old BWIA model, which was a political model under the same PNM administration. “It was costing us too much under this model and we changed it.” Asked if any PNM politician ever got a free ticket from CAL, Enill said: “Nobody would have gotten free tickets from CAL. If the government had to go somewhere, it paid for the tickets and paid the commercial rates.”