Robert Persaud sells controversially acquired iRadio to foreign company
Robert Persaud
Former Minister of Natural Resources, Robert Persaud, has relinquished ownership of his controversially obtained radio iRadio 90.1 Love FM. Persaud recently concluded a deal that was long in the making with the ANSA McAl-owned Guardian Media Group. The new iRadio owner has already begun advertising for a General Manager to run the operations. Persaud was one of several persons granted radio licences back in 2011 under “shady circumstances.” The Guardian Media Limited (GML) is the media section of the Trinidad-based Company ANSA McAL. Headquartered at 22-24 St Vincent Street, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, the media section’s subsidiaries operate under one publicly traded entity, the GML. GML operates in the print, radio and television, with a dynamic portal offering news headlines on its site along with an e-paper, live streaming of its radio frequencies, and streaming content of all of the stations’ local content. The media section spans Trinidad and Tobago and comprises three divisions: Cable News Channel 3; Trinidad Broadcasting Company (TBC Radio Network) and Trinidad Publishing Company (Guardian Newspapers). The licence for the bandwidth that iRadio uses was initially granted to Telecor and Cultural Broadcasting Inc. whose Directors are listed as Persaud’s wife, Kamini Persaud, who is also the niece of former President Jagdeo and Ruth Baljit of New York. Baljit is the sister of Robert Persaud and was at the time the sole owner of the company. She continues to reside in the United States. Telecor and Cultural Broadcasting Inc. is a company that was incorporated by Attorney-at-Law, Jaya Manickchand, in 2009. The company was incorporated with 500,000 shares. Days before it formally received its radio licence to operate five frequencies, Telecor and Cultural Broadcasting Inc. appointed four Directors to ensure that more than 51 per cent of the voting powers on the board would be Guyanese residing in Guyana. This made the company fully compliant with the requirements under the Broadcast Act. But even before the company satisfied this criterion, its licence was already approved by the Guyana National Broadcast Authority (GNBA). This was done on June 21, 2013. However, Chairperson of the GNBA, Bibi Shadick, two days earlier, on June 19, 2013, had announced that 24 licences (Radio/TV/Cable) were ready to be handed out and all that remained for the operators to do was pay their fees. But Telecor had not satisfied the criterion for the voting rights residing in more than 50 per cent of the Directors’ resident in Guyana. This meant that the GNBA had already approved the radio licence for Telecor and Cultural Broadcasting Inc., even before it became fully compliant with the requirements for Directors. When Bharrat Jagdeo in 2011 approved Telecor and Cultural Broadcasting Inc, for a radio licence, the company had a sole shareholder in the person of Ruth Baljit, a Guyanese national who is also a US Citizen, Resident in the United States. The Company Secretary was Omkarananda Lochan, the Permanent Secretary in Robert Persaud’s Natural Resources Ministry. He has since resigned. The Broadcast Act requires that 51 per cent of the voting members of the Board of Directors be Guyanese nationals, residing locally. This publication understands that the company had applied for a licence and when it was shortlisted, it was written to, to put its house in order.