Former CEO Shiva Ramnarine uncovered a troubling reality at Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT). The company lost roughly US $160 million annually to what insiders call the “contract mafia”, networks of vendors embedded deeply in procurement processes. Over 15 years, this drain would approximate a staggering US $2.4 billion from the essential public service provider.
The systematic waste didn’t stem from obvious criminal activity but from legitimate firms with political connections who exploited organizational blind spots through complexity, opacity, and the assumption that their services would never face serious scrutiny.
The Human Cost of Vendor Capture
When vendor influence dominates budgets, workers pay the price. As procurement costs balloon to accommodate unnecessary spending, organizations cut expenses elsewhere: hiring freezes become permanent, training programs vanish, and infrastructure maintenance gets delayed.
Shiva Ramnarine told the Joint Select Committee on State Enterprises on February 19th, 2024, that their attempts to negotiate lower supplier rates were met with accusations of jeopardizing service quality, when in truth the real inefficiency was rooted in inherited contracts laden with unnecessary spending, unoptimized wastage, and inflated charges
The pattern extends beyond telecommunications. Healthcare agencies employ fewer nurses. Schools face larger class sizes. Municipal services leave potholes unfilled while expensive street-lighting or road maintenance contracts remain active. Workers become scapegoats for financial shortfalls they didn’t create.
The emotional toll compounds these effects. Staff watch colleagues lose jobs while survivors take on additional responsibilities without fair compensation. Young professionals reconsider public service careers when they see advancement opportunities sacrificed to maintain vendor relationships.
False Urgency Tactics
“Emergency procurement” often silences careful financial controllers. The finance veteran witnessed this pattern consistently through his decades-long career.
“When the request came in for millions of dollars of batteries, they indicated it was an emergency,” he said of one example at TSTT. “They could only purchase it from that vendor. They indicated that was the only type of batteries that would work.”
He deployed a tactical response that exposed the fabricated urgency. “My response was: ‘No problem, I will approve this and each of you will sign this request, but I am going to have it audited by an independent party, and if your statements prove incorrect, I will recommend that persons be fired.'”
The results proved telling. “Surprisingly, no one signed it. The emergency went away.”
Shiva Ramnarine’s Path Through Skepticism
When he started applying systematic oversight to TSTT’s procurement practices, Ramnarine faced strong skepticism. “The executives led by the CEO that existed at the time said, ‘We are bare bones. There’s nothing to find.’ And then we found $160 million in wastage.”
This figure, $160 million in non-labor annual cost reductions, resulted from his methodical approach to challenging what he terms “vendor influence corruption.” His methodology questions emergency requests, verifies technical claims, reviews licensing agreements and analyzes maintenance contracts.
“That’s annualized,” he emphasized. “So that’s every year going forward.”
The remaining $180 million in savings came from organizational restructuring, but Ramnarine maintains that addressing vendor-driven spending should precede workforce reductions. “It’s easier to cut people rather than redesign processes and rethink where costs should be spent,” he observed.
$36 Million Transaction
Ramnarine’s approach yielded dramatic results. In one case, renegotiating a single vendor rate saved TSTT US $36 million in a single transaction.
Working alongside then-CEO Lisa Agard, he applied the same rigorous approach across dozens of contracts. Their efforts halved network and IT costs, transforming TSTT from a cash-loss position of US $360 million per year into a financially sustainable operation.
These savings didn’t come easily. The process required challenging long-standing practices, replacing reflexive approvals with data-driven reviews, and empowering teams to scrutinize every line item.
Governance Loop
Shiva Ramnarine developed what he calls a “governance loop”, a process innovation that breaks the direct line between requisition and approval by inserting an objective review.
“Instead of one person raising a purchase requisition and another approving it, we need a loop that goes to an objective group,” he explained. This objective group, either independent reviewers or an AI-driven system, analyzes requests against historical patterns, benchmarks, and technical specifications.
The approach transforms procurement by removing interpersonal dynamics from oversight. “You remove the personal nature that someone is trying to stop things or slow things down,” the cost-cutting specialist said.
His model has attracted interest from major corporations. Executives at a billion-dollar American multinational recently told him, “We have too many digital solutions. We would love the concept of a group of people to create a loop, break the process into a committee for review.”
Worker Paradox
Ramnarine identified a perverse irony in the vendor influence system: the very workforce suffering from contract exploitation often unwittingly defends it. At TSTT, staff whose livelihoods were directly hurt by inflated contracts sometimes helped preserve these arrangements.
These employees would disseminate misleading information, leak distorted data to unions, and resist reforms aimed at dismantling corruption that undermined their own progress. This contradiction demonstrates how deeply entrenched these vendor networks become, turning potential allies into unwitting opponents of their own interests.
Reclaiming Resources for People
Through Mobius Consulting Panama, founded in 2022, Shiva Ramnarine now develops tools and methodologies to identify patterns invisible to individual reviewers.
“What AI will do is raise red flags where things don’t make sense,” he explained. “If you spend on a quarterly basis on certain expense types and then it moves to a monthly basis, it will flag ‘Wait a minute, something’s wrong.'”
The system analyzes service quality and follow-up patterns: “If someone repairs a generator and the next month the generator breaks down, something is wrong. You shouldn’t raise a requisition for that. You should question the actual service and demand it be done for free.”
This approach focuses on pattern identification rather than accusation. “It would not classify it as corruption,” the finance leader emphasized. Instead, it surfaces anomalies that warrant investigation.
Fork in the Road
Organizations must decide whether to keep following vendor-driven spending or to choose a path that emphasizes workforce empowerment.
The first path allows funds to flow into entrenched contractor networks, perpetuating dependency cycles where emergency procurements become normal practice. Budget reviews become battles between finance teams and procurement or department officers tied to outside interests.
The second path redirects reclaimed dollars toward investments in people and systems. Every dollar saved from inflated contracts creates opportunities to upskill staff, modernize equipment, and build internal capabilities.
Global Method Gains Traction
Shiva Ramnarine’s methodologies now attract attention from multinational corporations and government agencies seeking to optimize spending without defaulting to workforce reductions.
His approach combines traditional procurement controls with newer technologies, creating multiple barriers against financial waste while depersonalizing the oversight process. By addressing systemic patterns rather than isolating individual bad actors, the methodology offers organizations a pathway to reclaim significant resources lost to what he calls “inert hidden routine corruption.”
For executives facing claims that no significant savings exist, Ramnarine’s experience offers a powerful counterargument. Even in organizations believed to operate at maximum efficiency, systematic review of vendor-influenced spending often reveals millions in recoverable waste hiding in plain sight.
