TROUKLER

RE-A-VELING INCIDENT

As a regular reader of the Nation Newspaper, I was most intrigued by a recent interview by Captain David Savy, CEO of Air Seychelles, which appeared in the “Sosyete” column of the 8th July 2006. What was most interesting is the fact that Mr. Savy by his actions, was dedicated an entire page in the Nation to defend his position as a Director in a company called “VELING” which is based in Mauritius that deals in aircraft purchase & sales, spare parts, maintenance and insurance.

The activities of this company have only come to light recently following accusations in the Mauritian media and Parliament that both Mr. Savy & a Co- Director Veerasamy, are in positions of conflicts of interest vis-à-vis there respective positions with their national airlines. It seems that Mr. Savy according to the company site has been a Director since late 2005 (if this can be believed).

Given that this Company is involved in the aircraft industry and at least one Air Seychelles plane was sold or leased through them (Veling arranged the lease of one Boeing B737-700 from Air Seychelles to Air Sahara) recently, this places Mr. Savy in an obvious conflict of interest situation. The fact that Mr. Savy fails to recognise this conflict should be of concern to all of us.

It is a difficult proposition to believe that Mr. Savy sits on the Board of Veling for no remuneration. This is very unlikely. Remuneration can come in many forms other than salary including such things as consultancy, administration, management fees, gifts, free travel etc, etc). The fact that Mr. Savy failed in his obligation to inform the Seychellois public of this interest at the time that he publicly released a statement relating to the on-lease of the Air Seychelles B737 is worthy of note. Mr. Savy affirms that Air Seychelles has made no payments to the other Directors of Veling, however, the web site indicates that the Veling company was directly involved in on-selling an Air Seychelles Boeing aircraft. No Company in the world will involve itself in on-leasing or selling of aircraft without taking a healthy profit on the deal. The profits will trickle down into management fees or salaries of Directors.

Interestingly, the web site of Veling has seen a number of recent modifications since the original story broke in Mauritius. As of Friday 8th July 2006, the references to the sales/leasing of the Air Seychelles B737 Aircraft have been removed from the company’s news site. The Company Directors profiles have been altered. Mr. Savy states that his Co Director, Mr. Veerasamy of Air Mauritius, is no longer a Director on the Company because he resigned, before he, Mr. Savy came on board as Director of Veling, because of his obvious conflict of interest between his new position at Air Mauritius and the Veling company. This begs the question as to why Mr. Savy did not see that his own position in Air Seychelles was directly replicated by Mr. Veerasamy with Air Mauritius. The fact that the matter is now a hot topic in Mauritius Parliament is itself indicative that there is still much to learn about these two Directorships.

It should be noted that an addition has been recently made to the Veling site on this matter. The site now states “ that Mr Veerasamy (Nivan),has therefore resigned from the Board of Veling on the 29th September 2005) and yet his CV is still listed on the site. It would appear most logical to remove him entirely from the Company web site soon after he resigned. The change is an obvious after thought, in an attempt to disguise his possible ongoing relationship with Veling. This may be supported by the fact that the format type used in the wording indicating his resignation is different from the original text of the web site, a clear unnecessary, later addition.

The listing of the date of Mr. Savy joining the Veling Company as a Director (“Captain Savy joined the Board of Veling on 10 November 2005”, may also be questionable, as there are listed a number of Directors, including the management team and yet none of these listed positions indicate a specific date upon which they joined the Company as either a Director or management staff and yet only Mr. Savy’s date is listed. Consistency suggests that all of the Directors would have had the date upon which they assumed their position listed.

Another intriguing feature of this Veling Web site, is the fact that it states that Mr. Savy is also a Director of “Beachcomber Hotels”. This little bit of news was conveniently, left out of the press releases when St Anne Resort was being developed, despite substantial media speculation vis-à-vis the interests of Mauritius and his brother Francis Savy. But this is another story that will no doubt come to light in the fullness of time.

MICHEL’S CAMPAIGN FIZZLES OUT

I watched intently the first series of party political broadcasts for the forthcoming presidential elections and quickly realized that what was expected to be the SPPF’s opening salvo very quickly fizzled out into a lackluster broadcast.  Maybe Michel should have hired the services of Antoine Onezime who would have probably warned him against the use of your opponents’ photos in your program (no matter how detrimental to them) as this shows you do not have much to offer and are simply drawing attention away from that. In fact this was confirmed in the subsequent issue of The People in which the front page was devoted to criticisms of the opposition program with nothing to promote the SPPF’s own plans. Antoine Onezime, SBC’s man of the moment, would have also asked Michel why is it that he chose not to include any of his past achievements, especially his 15 years as Minister of Finance, since his publication ‘The People’ never cease to remind us that Michel is a man of all times. Surely that would have helped greatly to build up the character of James Alix Michel. Could it be that the ‘achievements’ of a finance minister who has taken the country’s economy into a deep depression does not make for good election campaign?

July 14, 2006