The following is a statement from Sagicor Jamaica in response to a story on the company’s annual report published in our
Sunday Finance
magazine this week.
Sagicor
Group Jamaica (SGJ) completely rejects as false the headline of a Jamaica Observer article published on Sunday, May 7, 2023 which said ‘Sagicor sacks four execs’. Additionally, the article itself is misleading and erroneous.
Most significantly, none of the former executives mentioned in the article were terminated by SGJ. Each of them either (i) resigned for personal reasons, or (ii) the positions they held were made redundant due to company reorganisation. This headline therefore is potentially damaging to the reputation of the executives named in the article, as well as the Sagicor brand.
As one example of this egregious misrepresentation, Brenda-Lee Martin’s tenure as vice-president at Sagicor overlapped with her tenure as the CEO of SGJ’s then-subsidiary Sagicor Real Estate X Funds Limited (SREXF).
Following ongoing dialogue about the structure of the group and Sagicor’s sale of all its shares in SREXF, Ms Martin’s substantive role became exclusively that of CEO of SREXF, a position that she occupies to date. It must also be noted that there was no requirement for this to be reported to the Jamaica Stock Exchange.
This article also contains other inaccuracies and innuendos which have the potential to mislead Sagicor’s shareholders, clients, regulators, and the general public.
For example, the unfortunate juxtaposition of a baseless assertion about the timing of the re-organisation with a completely unrelated quote from our president and CEO explaining the rationale for a major senior leadership reorganisation last October could most likely be taken out of context and misinterpreted, considering how it is placed in the article.
Another error is that the name of the branch manager of Sagicor Bank’s Liguanea Branch is misidentified, as the branch manager is Ms Laurel Webster.
It is noteworthy that Sagicor was never contacted nor presented with an opportunity to provide the facts prior to publication of the article. Considering this, we are extremely disturbed with the lack of professionalism, absence of fact-checking, and the overall sub-standard level of journalism evident in the article, which is not what we have come to expect from a reputable newspaper like the Jamaica Observer.
Editor’s note: The Jamaica Observer accepts that there were errors in the story and particularly the headline. We regret the errors and unreservedly apologise to Sagicor and individuals named.