THE?BOARD?AND?MANAGEMENT OF?CLICO might as well get it into their heads that we are not going to stop asking them for answers.
We will not cease prodding them to say something – anything! Our efforts will not flag in demanding from them some courtesy.
To some readers, it may seem our repeated Editorial comments on this subject are much like an old gramophone record in whose groove the playing needle is stuck.
The truth is answers, by all that is good and fair and wholesome, must be had from the CLICO’s bosses. Yes, we know that the entire sordid affair is headed for judicial management, as the CLICO group of companies flail about, and that it is under pressure from its policyholders to pay – and to pay “now”.
What most didn’t know was that former CLICO Holdings chairman Leroy Parris, who had retired in May and had presumably gone off into the sunset, was back on the board of directors by November of the same year.
What most didn’t know either was that Mr Parris was just as snugly back on the board of the subsidiary CLICO?International Life Insurance – just in January.
That is the kind of silent treatment CLICO’s board and management have been dishing out to Mrs June Fowler and all the other CLICO?policyholders and investors she had mobilized to ask for answers – some explanation.
Well, what explanation does CLICO have to offer for the reappointment of Mr Parris to its board? Is he better able than the others to tell policyholders and the public what really went wrong?
And would he be better able to explain how a director of two companies can be suing them both for moneys allegedly owed?
And would Mr Parris explain, while he is at it, why he believes payments to him should have priority over those to policyholders for whom he held responsibility up until his retirement, and which, commonsensically speaking, he has renewed responsibility for by taking back up directorship?
Mr Parris is crying foul for not getting his full $10 million gratuity from CLICO?Holdings, having only received $3.6 million so far, and he is also claiming maturity payments owed of $3.5 million.
It took a lawsuit before the courts for us to know this.
Meanwhile, CLICO policyholders of far less means and expectations are subsumed in negative thought of unlikely compensation for their current travails, by dint of dying before there is restitution, or by their seed never inheriting.
As CLICO’s Mr Parris cries out for his own justice, his charges keep languishing in their darkest hour.
What else can come now to shock us even more?
