Series Overview:
In this special investigative series of Vendor Influence and corruption, we examine the bold testimony of former CFO Shiva Ramnarine, who exposed deep-rooted corruption, vendor collusion, and boardroom conflicts of interest within Trinidad and Tobago’s national telecoms provider, TSTT. From sweetheart contracts to systemic failures in governance, Ramnarine’s revelations reveal not just financial mismanagement, but a corporate culture hijacked by self-interest. This three-part exposé tracks the crisis, the complicit, and the call for sweeping reform.
Part 1: The ‘Vendor Mafia’ Bleeding TSTT Dry
When Shiva Ramnarine stepped in as Chief Financial Officer, TSTT was already in dire straits, burdened by $3 billion in debt and haemorrhaging $30 million in cash each month. Yet instead of tightening belts, an entrenched cabal of suppliers was feasting on the company’s woes. Ramnarine’s JSC testimony painted a damning picture of a “vendor mafia” entrenched in TSTT’s operations, siphoning millions through inflated fees and dubious “emergency” projects. He recounted how basic cost-control measures met fierce resistance. “Where else in the world does a CFO and CEO… say, ‘Listen, we need to cut costs, we need to optimise wastage,’ and it is met without favour? It is met with discord… we now have to justify why we want to cut costs. Bizarre, to say the least,” Ramnarine exclaimed. This was no ordinary pushback. It was governance turned on its head, as if efficiency itself threatened the very interests controlling the purse strings.
Ramnarine pulled back the curtain on how vendors had inflated charges at TSTT for years, reaping fat profits at the company’s expense. In one striking example, an external contractor had been billing $90 per hour for services until Ramnarine’s team brought in auditors to validate the market rate. The result? Market price was almost half – $50/hour – saving TSTT $36 million on that single contract. “Vendors’ profitability moved down by $36 million. TSTT saved $36 million on that one transaction,” Ramnarine testified, highlighting just how bloated and lucrative these deals had been. This vendor had the contract for the better part of 15 years. That is over half a billion dollars in overcharges from the vendor. This was not an isolated case – “I could give countless examples,” he noted, describing a pattern of emergency spending and padded contracts that bled the company dry . According to an interview with Shiva Ramnarine, TSTT’s Networks and IT costs ran nearly 15% of revenue – far above industry norms – until a forensic audit found “redundancy upon redundancy” in vendor services and cut that cost by half. Each dollar saved was a dollar less for the vendor cartel that had grown fat off TSTT’s lax oversight. Small wonder that the push for prudence triggered a ferocious backlash.
Behind the scenes, long-standing alliances between certain vendors and TSTT insiders created a culture of impunity. These suppliers, some embedded for 20+ years, had friends in high places ensuring their gravy train stayed on track. “Legacy vendors (had) persons working at TSTT… for more than 20 years. Think about those relationships,” Ramnarine urged, noting how deeply enmeshed the vendor network was in the company’s fabric. When he dared to challenge this status quo by renegotiating contracts and capping waste, the response was swift and menacing. “Was there animosity…? Absolutely! Relationships with board members and those vendors? Absolutely!” he revealed. Both he and then-CEO Lisa Agard faced “threats… directly (and) indirectly” from aggrieved suppliers upset that their sweetheart deals were being revoked.
In Ramnarine’s eyes, this went beyond mere mismanagement – it was a systemic racket, a “vendor mafia” of collusive contractors and complicit officials operating with impunity. He implored the committee to investigate “incompetence, nepotism and other issues” at TSTT, suggesting the rot ran deep. Indeed, after painstakingly steering the company back toward profitability, stamping out roughly $160 million in “unoptimized wastage” through his reforms, Ramnarine and Agard were unceremoniously terminated. “A company is returned to profitability against all odds, and the architects are terminated… Could it be that elevation of poor-performance individuals paved the way for a feeding frenzy for board members, vendors and staff?” he mused pointedly. The implication was clear: TSTT’s governance had been hijacked from within, with a network of insiders enabling profiteering at the public’s expense.