Another high profile CLICO casualty

Leroy Parris, who has been with Clico for over 30 years and has been the face of the Barbados operations for many of those years,

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, April 8, 2010 – The spate of high profile departures across CLICO’s Caribbean operations has continued with a surprise retirement announcement yesterday (Wednesday, April 7) by Leroy Parris, head of CLICO Holdings (Barbados) Ltd.

Citing “pressure” as a factor in his decision, Parris announced at an afternoon Press conference that he was retiring as chief executive officer of CLICO International Life with effect from July 1, 2010. He added that he would hold on as chairman of the other companies under CLICO’s Barbados portfolio “until any changes are being made”. 

Sale agreements have already been reached with the island’s largest credit union the National Union of Public Workers Cooperative Credit Union to purchase CLICO Mortgage and Finance Corporation; and indigenous insurance company Consumers’ Guarantee Insurance to purchase CLICO International General Insurance Ltd. as CLICO Holdings (Barbados) continues to divest itself of assets in order to meet financial requirements.

Parris, who has been with Clico for over 30 years and has been the face of the Barbados operations for many of those years, follows the growing trend of executive departures witnessed across the Trinidad operations of Clico parent-company CL Financial so far this year.

Since the beginning of this year, Trinidad has seen the resignation of CL Financial’s group financial officer, Michael Carballo, and managing director, Steve Bideshi, who resigned from parent company with effect from January. These resignations were followed by that of chief executive officer of Clico’s Trinidad operations Claude Musaib-Ali in February; while the chairman of Dr Euric Bobb also resigned at the end of last month.

Once one of the financial service giants of the Caribbean, CL Financial undertook a series of misdealings in recent years that resulted in its being taken over and restructed by the Trinidad government in January 2009. The knock-on effect saw CL Financial’s subsidiaries and associate companies from Belize down to Guyana struggling to meet their commitments, which resulted in a number of operations being wound-up through government interventions in the different territories in which they operated.