Port-of-Spain: The Office of the Attorney General is suing the former board of the Evolving Tecknologies and Enterprise Development Company (ETECK) following a forensic probe and subsequent legal advice, that puts the loss of $30 million squarely down to negligence.
Attorney General Anand Ramlogan made the announcement today. He says the board which was headed by Professor Ken Julien ignored advice from the Ministry of Finance and did not take propoer precautions when it entered into a US$5 million agreement with a Hong Kong-based company.
It's the first legal action out of a series of probes launched by the Attorney General on state companies as they operated under the former regime.
He says ETECK entered into an alliance with Bamboo Network in July 2004 for an Information Technology industry butby December that year the Ministry of Finance was advising not to pursue it because of the poor financial state of the company; because of it's very short track record; and because of a lack of a proper management structure.
ETECK persisted advising that Bamboo Network had backing from a Japanese company Tiger Technologies.
The probe, however found no evidence to support this. Tiger Technologies was wound up in 2000. Bamboo Network was incorporated in 1999.
The AG says the money was paid directly to bamboo and not through an Escrow account which would have put the money on hold until Bamboo fulfilled its commitments. He says Bamboo changed it's name to Echo Information Systems and before long, with the US$5 million already paid-up, the company ceased to exist.
The AG believes that if proper due diligence was done, this loss could have been avoided and he says legal advice to him is that the board is liable of a breach of the company's act for a series of reasons. As a result pre-action protocol letters have been served on all but one director of the board.
The AG says the intent is to recover the $30 million and he's warning of further investigations against other boards that operated under the former regime.
The AG says he is disappointed with the slow pace of the Director of Public Prosecutions in initiating criminal proceeding on many of the allegations in the public domain but says he will pursue civil action as far as possible.
You must be logged in to post a comment.