POINTE BLANCHE–St. Maarten Harbour Group of Companies Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Mingo recently signed an agreement with Ernst and Young Advisory Services for an Enterprise Risk Assessment (ERA) of the government-owned company.
“The ERA will allow us to chart our future in 2016 and beyond based on data, and information that identifies risks. The assessment is a management tool to guide our strategic planning which is in line with good corporate and integrity governance,” said Mingo in a press statement on Monday.
The ERA report will summarise risks and mitigation strategies for the Harbour Group. “This is very essential in going forward in 2016 and beyond. It will be a guide to our future strategic planning, implementation and investment strategies,” he said.
ERA is the process of planning, organising, leading, and controlling the activities of an organisation in order to minimise the effects of risk on an organisation’s capital and earnings. The risk management expands the process to include not just risks associated with accidental losses, but also financial, strategic, operational, and other risks.
As a government-owned company, the Harbour Group has a responsibility to its shareholder to ensure it operates according to its statutory regulations, but at the same time making sure the board and management decisions allow the companies to operate optimally and productively with the least amount of risks, said Mingo.
“Besides the shareholder, the board of directors and management have to also answer to bond-holders and other financiers such as banking institutions who are strategic partners in the growth of any organisation,” he said.
It is normal for the shareholder and other entities to want to scrutinise companies’ risk-management policies and procedures. ERA comes from the Harbour Group’s annual operational audits instituted a few years ago and, in particular, from the operational audit actions from November 2014.
The agreement with Ernst and Young Advisory Services has two tiers: identify and diagnose. The first phase will look at defining roles and responsibilities, meetings with key stakeholders, development of a work plan and collecting initial set of company data.
The diagnose phase will identify and understand the Harbour Group key business risks and develop an appropriate risk assessment criteria for use in assessing and prioritising these key business risks.
The benefactors after the assessment will be the shareholder and the 79 employees, who represent 13 companies of the Harbour Group, that are responsible for some one-third of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country.
Source: The Daily Herald Harbour Group to carry out risk management assessment
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