PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – Last month, veteran journalist Owen Baptiste, former editor in chief of both the T&T Guardian and the Trinidad Express, spent a week in Florida talking with Lawrence Duprey. This is the first of an exclusive five-part series by Baptiste, based on their long, frank discussions of Duprey’s past and his vision and hopes for the future. Fort Lauderdale, Fl Thursday, March 21—It was not possible, after spending a week with Lawrence Duprey, the disgraced chairman of the Colonial Life Insurance Company Ltd and of the CLF Group of Companies, to come away not wondering if the anointed successor to Cyril Lucius Duprey had not been a lucky and skilful entrepreneur so much as a colourful adventurer, a sweet-talker and a bloody idiot. This would not be the confusion one would have had about Sidney Knox and Thomas Gatcliffe, rivals in the business world of the Caribbean and business leaders he would criticise for having a narrow vision of their entrepreneurial role in T&T. But Walter Lippmann had warned that “when you come to international affairs confusion is compounded” and Duprey had mounted this stallion for more than 20 years and had stood in the arena like a colossus until the world’s financial crisis put an end to his image of omnipotence.
