(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.

Nonetheless, Manning says none of those Cabinet members, including Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira, has any conflict of interest in the matter since they have declared their portfolios with the Integrity Commission.

“Half the Cabinet of Trinidad of Tobago has shares with CLICO in some form, policies – and half of the people in the Parliament,” Manning said.
Asked if he was one of them, he replied, “I have no investments.”
He was responding to questions relating an article published in the Sunday Guardian which stated that Nunez-Tesheira “has presided over the billion-dollar bailout of the CL Financial group, even as she herself has owned shares in the conglomerate.”
“I think that is mischievous,” Manning said.

CLICO, two other CL Financial businesses, the British American insurance company, stock brokerage firm CMMB, the now dissolved CLICO Investment Bank (CIB), benefited from the bailout.