DI PEOPLE DEM MONEY…………LIBBATY A TEK

Bankrupt investors accuse Gov’t of blocking Finsac report
BY BALFORD HENRY Senior staff reporter [email protected]
Thursday, December 20, 2012

THE Association of Finsac’d Entrepreneurs (AFE) has accused the Government of deliberately obscuring the findings of the FINSAC Commission of Enquiry to avoid embarrassment.
“We have been informed that [they] have decided that the report will remain covert,” AFE President Yola Gray-Baker told the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday.
Gray-Baker said that the AFE will today lay out all the information it has to support its claims at a press conference scheduled for Medallion Hall Hotel in St Andrew.
She claimed that evidence gathered during the enquiry have shown that serious blunders were made in the management of the meltdown, and the handling of the assets of the institutions and their clients.
The Jamaican Chapter of the Caribbean Actuarial Association (CAA), in a report to the recent parliamentary review committee on public sector pension, stated that the mid-1990s financial sector meltdown is a major contributor to Jamaica’s current debt stock.
“It is estimated that the resolution cost some 41.2 per cent of GDP. The resolution was funded by high-cost debt in the international capital markets because of the Washington consensus,” the actuarial association informed the parliamentary committee.
The CAA compared that to the current approach to resolving similar crises in various countries, including the United States and Japan as well as the European Union, using low cost funds from multilateral agencies and the central bank of the affected country.
Gray-Baker said that information garnered since the enquiry has made the Government reluctant to expose itself to a report from the two-man commission, which comprised chartered accountant Worrick Bogle and investment banker Charles Ross. They finished the hearings nearly 13 months ago, but are yet to issue even an interim report.
The commission’s office at the PIOJ building in New Kingston has been closed since the start of the year, and both commissioners have refused to comment on the situation.
The AFE wrote to Governor General Sir Patrick Allen in August seeking his intervention after former Minister of Finance Audley Shaw suggested that the Government had “overstepped its bounds” by cutting off funding for the commission to complete its work. However, since acknowledging receipt of the request, King’s House has issued no further response.
Minister of Finance and Planning Dr Peter Phillips said in June that, after spending over $65 million on the enquiry, with bills still outstanding for rental and other costs, the only funds that will be made available in the future would be to pay a stenographer to type the report.

Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Bankrupt-investors-accuse-Gov-t-of-blocking-Finsac-report_13242257#ixzz2FbI2AT5V

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