Word: seereeram
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...Seereeram contacted Dominica's government after seeing documents related to the bonds. According to the terms of the deal, outlined in documents obtained by Time, the airport was to be financed in part by bonds to be secured by a $2.8 million "sinking fund," or money loaned in excess of construction needs and managed by Citibank. But instead of investing the sinking fund elsewhere, the documents show, Citibank used the fund to buy up the airport bonds and convert them into a different kind of bond that reaped a higher premium, without telling the borrower...
...Trinidad, Trinidad is reconsidering another controversial deal, a complex 1998 interest-rate swap now under review by its attorney general. Conrad Enill, Trinidad's Finance Minister, says his government is closely watching what happens in Dominica. So far no one has been willing to reopen the Trintomar transaction, but Seereeram persists. It took his father 15 years to win his sugar battle. Seereeram has been fighting for only four...
...News of Seereeram's investigations surfaced in the local press, and Citibank took out full-page ads in Port-of-Spain's daily newspapers in January 2001 defending its reputation. Citibank had commissioned Ernst & Young to conduct "an independent analysis of the entire transaction," the ads said. "The Ernst & Young report corroborates Citibank's own findings, that the 1993 transaction with Trintomar was fair, reasonable and appropriate...
...spring of 2001, the investigations into the Trintomar transaction had fizzled out. Seereeram was distracted when a partner in his consulting firm was disgraced in a separate financial scandal. Seereeram was turning into a Dickensian figure: the aggrieved claimant in a never-ending dispute over money. This was a character he knew well: Seereeram's father, a sugar-cane farmer, spent 15 years fighting a law that required farmers to surrender a percentage of their profits to the sugar farmers' trade association...
...Seereeram hunted for other transactions in which Citibank had used financial instruments like those in the Trintomar deal, which, he says, "made them [Citibank] feel like they could get away with this." His chase led him to the nation of Dominica, a speck of island 300 miles north of Trinidad. Dominica depends on connecting flights on small planes from larger islands, and its minor tourist trade is struggling. The government sought bond financing from Citibank Trinidad to build Dominica's first major airport, which would be able to handle larger jets from the U.S. and Europe...