VERNON KHELAWAN Saturday, March 6 2004

Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves is taking his role as aviation spokesman for Caricom so seriously that he doesn’t mind reducing LIAT’s payroll to “fewer than 200 employees,” by outsourcing jobs to BWIA.

Gonsalves has been the chief lobbyist for the cash-strapped regional carrier over the last two years and is pushing hard to secure the formation of a single regional airline through the merger of Trinidad and Tobago’s BWIA and LIAT. He sees such a nexus as vital to LIAT’s continued survival since it would mean “certain backroom functions such as finance, marketing support and information technology” going to BWIA and other companies. Gonsalves is also advocating that BWIA use LIAT aircraft on its hire operations rather than use aircraft currently assigned to the Tobago-Trinidad airbridge service operated by Tobago Express. He rationalised this by saying, “Pilot productivity and aircraft utilisation can be significantly improved if BWIA were to use LIAT rather than Tobago Express for its Dash-8 hire-in operations.”

The Vincentian PM went so far as to list a number of accusations against the Antigua-based LIAT management. In a political opinion column in one of his country’s leading newspapers — the Vincentian PM Gonsalves said, “In the past LIAT has been inefficiently managed. There were waste, poor customer relations, overstaffing in Antigua, poor scheduling and overpricing.” He also blames LIAT’s woes on an “inadequate regulatory environment and a heavy debt burden from the past.” But while he is accusing LIAT of being plagued by all these ills, he is also accusing competitor Caribbean Star Airlines of predatory pricing and schedule mimicking. Dr Gonsalves recognises that LIAT’s necessary restructuring is being restricted by “lack of adequate funds for more outsourcing of goods and services.”

Gonsalves, in a sort of half-hearted attack on Trinidad and Tobago for its failure to expedite the planned merger of BWIA and LIAT, referred to a meeting in November 2002 and a follow up in June last year when decisions were made to facilitate the BWIA/LIAT merger. “Other decisions to facilitate this nexus were taken, but these decisions were not carried out as they should have been,” complained Gonsalves. An emergency meeting in Port-of-Spain two weeks ago, saw Gonsalves meeting with TT’s Prime Minister Patrick Manning, pleading to have the merger effort move forward. The outcome of this meeting saw a new date being given for the merger as July 01 2004.Whether this would actually happen depends on a number of factors, most important of which is the “fixing of BWIA first,” which has always been Trinidad and Tobago’s position on the formation of a single regional airline. But while all this posturing is going on, LIAT needs another (EC)$17 million to keep it flying until June 30 2004. Where are these funds going to come from? That’s anybody’s guess.