Dawn Ritch, ContributorIn this vale, the vale of tears, it is useful to remember that Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies made a tremendous national push to get rid of those persons in the financial sector whom he deemed not "fit and proper."
Indeed, by the time he was done there was no domestic financial sector left.
People who worked in the failed and now extinct companies were consigned to the trash-heap of unemployment, and senior managers shunned simply for the sin of having worked there.
Those in the latter pile, when employment is at long last found, are consigned to the back rooms and told to work quietly and out-of-sight.
This is not to comment upon the fate of the erstwhile Jamaican owners of the financial sector.
I want merely to observe that despite battalions of local and foreign legal experts paid by the state, court cases have yielded very little by way of an end to the matter.
Despite great expense and the FINSAC debt, the ruin of many, many lives and reputations, the whole truth of why an entire and pivotal sector largely owned and run by Jamaicans was destroyed has yet to be made public.
Bankers' privilege of confidentiality, we are told by Dr. Davies, apparently means that this must forever remain secret.
Yet the ruin of the Jamaican productive sector as a whole can hardly have been more devastatingly public.
Who is fooling whom around here? Dr. Davies must jest when he says that the notion of a "fit and proper" person could ever have been a consideration, either of his ministry or the Bank of Jamaica.
Proof in the
pudding
His concern about the "fitness" of Jamaican auditors is equally laughable, even though most of them are now unofficially barred from auditing financial institutions.
I say all this because the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. Dr. Davies has beyond any doubt reduced the Jamaican economy to ashes.
The pudding itself, however, is to be found over at the National Investment Bank of Jamaica (NIBJ).
This Government institution is headed by Mr. Rex James, former managing director of National Commercial Bank, which was "FINSACED", but allowed to survive by the Government pumping in billions.
It has survived like the banker who himself presided over that failure, unlike the treatment of the other bankers.
Given a golden handshake by the then largely Government-owned NCB, Mr. James was further rewarded with the plum position of president of NIBJ.
This Government body presides over the Capital Development Fund which is the money that comes from the bauxite levy and which is supposed to fund new development to sustain the country when bauxite, a wasting resource, is mined out.
Judging from Prime Minister P. J. Patterson's statements in the House of Representatives last week, it seems that what took place in the NIBJ recently amounted to abuse and corruption of the entire process of loan disbursements in about eight or nine places. This is now known as the NetServ scandal, but not a soul in Government is to pay with their jobs.
Mr. Patterson in the House absolved the NIBJ, all Ministers associated with the project and himself of any wrongdoing in the NetServ affair.
"NIBJ did not report to its board and ultimately to me. It reported to the specific loan committee responsible for all decisions," he said.
Once again Mr. Patterson has passed the buck to the civil servants, who foolishly continue to allow themselves to be used.
This then, however, must be the committee to end all committees. It reports to the National Development Council chaired by the Prime Minister himself, which is itself a committee of Cabinet. But neither the Prime Minister, Ministers Phillip Paulwell nor Dr. Davies is in any way responsible for its decisions.
The NIBJ had no hesitation in abusing and corrupting the entire process of loan disbursement. Its president, Mr. James, regarded his role it appears as that of the person being merely asked to write out the cheques.
This he did with great alacrity, over $700 million worth, in contravention of the specific procedures established for disbursement by the Intech Fund.
Indeed the Auditor-General has identified a whole long list of procedures that were violated. Yet the ex-banker Mr. James was not responsible, and everybody connected to the affair has been absolved and is still safely in their jobs. Even HEART couldn't help get into the act, and lent NetServ $22 million which was later converted to a grant.
In my next reincarnation I want to be either one of the shady foreign investors in Jamaica, or a member of the PNP Jamaican Government which liaises with them. Money flows like water and nobody is accountable.
The cold, hard truth is that this money comes from taxes, forcibly extracted from the citizens of this country.
Improper persons
When we put our money in the failed private financial entities we did it voluntarily. Dr. Davies persecuted the owners through the courts, and alleged that they and their senior personnel were not "fit and proper" persons to be associated with future financial institutions in this country.
Yet he exempted Mr. Rex James who presided over the decline of NCB, and appointed him to preside over the public purse at NIBJ, and to continue to do so, even after the NetServ scandal.
Are we, therefore, to have only improper persons doing the Government's business?
With what moral authority, therefore, can he regard himself as the Government's policeman of private people? Here is a man with a beam stuck in his eye.
If by "fit and proper", the Finance Minister meant no bankrupts, then let him remember that in the United States a person is bankrupt for seven years. After that he can re-enter commerce and finance again if he wishes.
In Jamaica however, private people are banned for life and, therefore, ruined, while public people have no consequences.
This is a flagrant abuse of power for which the Prime Minister himself should step down. He cannot preside over decisions, and then claim he had no part in them.
Dr. Davies, Mr. Paulwell and Dr. Karl Blythe, who is responsible for the billion-dollar housing costs scandal in Operation PRIDE, should also resign.
The absence of the slightest inclination to do so, on the part of any, is proof positive that none of them even understands what "fit and proper" really means.
