The headlines told the story of the unfolding drama: ’The Clico Empire has collapsed’, ’CL melts down’, ’A giant fell’, ’A titan tumbles’. And in the stark front-page photographs published the day after the Central Bank stepped in at CL Financial, one observer saw the face of ’a humbled warrior’. But to those who know Lawrence Duprey, the experience of that fateful day might have been one of ’anguish’, even of ’betrayal’, but not at all of ’defeat’.
To them, and to many others, Duprey is indeed a warrior, but of a special kind-the kind described by behavioural theorists as ’successfully intelligent’. And, in blazing his way across the business world, he gave us front-row seats into the workings of a ’millionaire’s mind’.
’Successfully Intelligent’ people, it is said, use a combination of ’analytical’, ’creative’ and ’practical’ intelligence or, to put it simply, good street sense. Very early in life, they know their goals and learn to fight for them, particularly if labelled ’average’ or ’of less ability’.
They think big and are willing to stare down challenge and risk, confident in the belief that individual hard work, not luck, is the key to success. They create change. They know what to do when one door is closed; they play to win, while others simply try not to lose. They become leaders because they are bigger than their problems.
The entrepreneurial talent of Lawrence Duprey resided in his ability to see opportunity in challenge and in his confidence to conquer it. Back in the nineties, he spotted the opportunity ignored by a local business community without the confidence to see itself in the ’big league’. He was willing to take the risk in venturing beyond insurance into the uncharted and volatile waters of the energy industry, in the quest for the strong financial returns he could see beyond the horizon. To those clinging to the safety of the shoreline, Duprey was ’idealistic a cowboy’.
How Duprey got into the energy market is the stuff of legend.
It was the mid-1990s and the Government announced that it would place 20 per cent of the Methanol Company on the market. Duprey immediately saw an opportunity for Clico. To many, the idea of an insurance company entering the methanol industry was too much of a stretch to comprehend. Among them, the prime minister.
Until then, Duprey had not yet met the first-term Prime Minister Patrick Manning but sought an appointment through intermediaries. He then arranged for one of the world’s foremost experts in the methanol industry to come to Trinidad to be at his side at the meeting. The German, Dr Von Menges, flew in on his private jet for that meeting with the prime minister-but they were soon out the door, the meeting lasting some 15 minutes.
Insiders say that Duprey felt snubbed by Manning’s position that experience had shown that T&T did not have the capability for the industry, and that the Government was already prepared to sell its shareholding to Mitsui of Japan-just as it had done in selling the Iron and Steel Co (ISCOTT) to Mittal of India.
Close associates say that for years Duprey had been motivated by the fear expressed by Dr Eric Williams in the 1970s, that the State must prevent foreign domination-if not, ’local sharks would eat most of the local sardines, and foreign whales would continue to maraud unchecked in the waters around Trinidad’s shores.’
After that first meeting, they say, Duprey felt Manning had closed the door on his dream. That same year, 1995, Manning called the elections, and a stung Duprey turned to the United National Congress to see whether the Opposition would help realise the dream.
In his early tears at the helm of the insurance company bequeathed to him, Duprey had heeded his Uncle Cyril’s position that Clico ’was not a government, which always needs to examine the barometer of public opinion. We are a company that had built up public confidence by hard work, and we have assets to protect’.
Cyril Duprey’s comment was made in the fifties in response to Dr Williams’ inducement to join the political fray. To the titan of the insurance industry, Williams’ offer was a ’snare into a politic net’.
Until 1995, Lawrence Duprey had not met personally with Panday; he worked his support through intermediaries. Friends say that following the UNC victory that year, Duprey was prepared to wait in line to see the new prime minister.
Weeks after Panday took office, he called through to the PM’s secretary for an appointment, fully expecting to get an appointment weeks after Panday had settled in. But there was Panday, the charmer, personally taking his call, asking eagerly: ’Where are you now? You can come right away come now! I am waiting on you.’
The story is told about that first encounter between the aloof, socially-awkward businessman and the mercurial politician-with Duprey thrown by the effusiveness of Panday’s greeting, hugging him as though they were schoolmates, declaring: ’Lawrence, meh buddy! Thanks for your support. Oh gosh! How can we help you?’
Associates say it was Manning’s snub that fuelled the Duprey-Panday friendship. While Manning had ’closed the door on his dream’, the Panday government was asking, ’How can we help?’
Duprey, at first, properly allocated his time between insurance and energy, but with the State as facilitator, he began to extend his initial dream to a diversified empire, to the pillars of real estate, local and international, spirits and beverages, banking and finance, and numerous other services, which includes retailing and shopping malls. Throughout it all, Duprey stated openly that he could not do it alone.
He was all about the big picture; the people he trusted were left to handle the mechanics of those enterprises.
It was just like his uncle Cyril had operated years earlier. He built Clico, but left the nuts and bolts to a trusted ally and lieutenant. For Cyril Duprey, that trusted ally was Cyril Monsanto; for Lawrence Duprey, that person was Andre Monteil, leader of a small circle of trusted executives.
Still, empire-building, they say, was not easy for Lawrence Duprey. They related the story that Duprey oft-times told of himself and Kerston Coombs, an engineer and Clico director, sitting in a near-empty London airport in the ’90s. They had arrived in the wee hours, intransit, after long, gruelling meetings with the Germans on the Caribbean Methanol Plant negotiations. In the cold, dreary London climate, they felt broken and dispirited.
For the first time, they seemed to realise the magnitude of what they were attempting. They were from little T&T, a place few Germans had known-but they had been allowed into the door because they were men with both resources and a plan. The German scepticism of these ’islanders’ lingered, and the long, lonely hours in that airport were draining. At one point, they both seemed to agree that ’this was it we could go no farther’.
But then, those qualities of the ’successfully intelligent’ rose to the fore; Duprey reminded himself that he was ’bigger than the problem’.
In the first year of operations, the methanol project realised a profit of close to one billon dollars. And T&T began to see the making of its foremost ’economically-productive citizen’.
Gone then was the Clico that CL Duprey built over a 50-year span. The nephew’s leadership style was stark, daring and acquisitive, yet he displayed his showpieces of integrity and hard work. There were no longer economic frontiers, there were just markets.
With the offering of high returns, thousands of policy-holders and investors identified easily with his international reach.
In ten years, the centre shifted from Clico to a parent, CL Financial, which today spans the globe.
In the period 2003-2007, the assets of the parent company grew from $27.5 billion to $100 billion, with impressive pre-tax profits rising from $541 million to $2.5 billion in 2007.
Clico alone accounts for 53 per cent of the insurance market, that is, 53 per cent of all premiums collected are paid to the giant. In energy, its parent, CL Financial, owns five methanol plants, an ammonia plant and an AUM plant at Point Lisas; in spirits, it has built Angostura into a world brand, and recently purchased major international player, the Jamaican firm, Wray & Nephew, producers of Appleton; it holds the largest land bank in the Caribbean; it owns most of the major shopping malls- Valpark, Trincity, Long Circular, Atlantic Plaza; and some 23 per cent of One Caribbean Media, owners of TV6, the Express and the Nation in Barbados.
In the 1930s, the Duprey family had lost its holdings in cocoa. And as if to restore glory to the family name, Lawrence purchased and restored cocoa estates in Santa Cruz, Tamana, and Moruga.
Today, Clico is seen as humbled hegemon, left with crippling debt burdens; everyday it appears increasingly vulnerable. The Government has pledged to honour deposits and policies as it seeks to unravel convoluted related-party transactions, but in the main, it appears to be hoping that these difficulties would improve its own stature.
But this was not the Duprey plan. Friends say that like his uncle Cyril, he maintains that the first concern must not be personal survival-but the integrity of Clico’s policy-holders and investors. And yet
Today’s difficulty is not new to the giant, which was founded on December 15, 1936. Of the experience, Cyril Duprey wrote that ’the most difficult problem that I encountered was the lack of confidence the people of Trinidad had in a local individual coming to start an insurance company’.
Later, in the early life of the company, it would face questions about its solvency and attempts at sabotage by its foreign competitors, one circulating Clico’s balance sheet to policy-holders, with hints that Clico could not meet claims.
Last month, with the global economic conundrum as a backdrop, Lawrence was faced with a larger crisis; his solution was to find liquidity support for Clico. He was prepared to pledge the assets of CL Financial to the Government for a specified period. He felt that, given his understanding of the diversified empire and world financial trends, relief could come within that period, and Clico would be able to climb out of the hole.
First, the Clico team attempted to get a hearing with the prime minister; they were referred to the Minister of Finance and the Central Bank, which in turn said that the matter had to be referred to the ’higher-ups’.
Speaking with ’the higher-ups’ later took a different turn; there was the insistence on the ’Bail-out Plan’ as revealed on January 30.
On that day, Duprey’s disappointment was written large across his face. Friends say that even today, weeks later, the question that continues to haunt him is: ’Why? Was it jealousy? Was it personal? Was it against Clico, which had fought so many battles for its survival? Was it against the global expanse of the CL Brand? Was it against the Duprey family?’
To those who believe in the resilience of Duprey’s ’smart intelligence’, the terms of the Government’s intervention was indeed an unnecessary ’body-blow’ that sought ’to close the door’ on Duprey.
As one friend put it: ’This is just another challenge for Lawrence you will see he will turn this into an opportunity. He always says ’when you fall down seven times, you get up eight’.
