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Hudson sifted through contract language that he called "virtually incomprehensible" and found "two basic structural flaws" that were "wholly inconsistent with normally accepted standards of banking conduct." Hudson calculated that Citibank, as a result, was paid more than twice as much in interest and fees as it would have received under its initial proposal to Trintomar: a total of $21.1 million in fees and interest on a loan of, effectively, $61.5 million.
The surplus lending was, in Hudson's opinion, extraordinary and unexplained. "I can think of no good commercial reason for ... these features of the structure, and have seen no evidence of any," Hudson wrote. "I conclude, based on the evidence I have seen, that it is probable that the transaction, taken as a whole, was both fraudulent and corrupt." Hudson's report found a responsive audience in Baldeosingh, who stopped Petrotrin from doing business with Citibank and pushed the government to investigate. "We had an opportunity to recover a significant amount of money," Baldeosingh says. Instead, Trinidad's elected officials turned on Baldeosingh. After tussling with the Energy Minister over control of a Petrotrin unit, Baldeosingh left office.
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."
At the time, that was enough. Even now, Trintomar officials dismiss the idea that the deal took advantage of them. "I thought it was a well-taken decision," says Malcolm Jones, who signed the Citibank-Trintomar agreement on behalf of the state-owned gas firm. Jones says he relied on the finance staff of Petrotrin to evaluate the complicated deal. Petrotrin's president, Rodney Jagai, also defends the deal, arguing that the terms reflect Citibank's dominant position in the market at the time. "Citibank was the only game in town," he says, dismissing the offers made by other banks. "Were you really overcharged if this is the only lender in town?" Citibank also stands by the deal. "In 1999, when issues were raised in the local press, we reviewed those transactions again and confirmed that they were reasonable and appropriate," says spokeswoman Rodriguez.
By the 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.