‘Unacceptable’

The Government’s release of the information gathered by the FINSAC Commission on the conditions that led to the financial meltdown of the 1990s has been described as “unacceptable” by one of the victims.

Yola Gray-Baker, president of the Association of Finsac’d Entrepreneurs, said what was promised to Jamaicans and those significantly impacted by FINSAC was a report which would include findings on what transpired.

Further, she said Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke released the information without addressing debtors and what they went through.

“They are calling us bad debtors. Jamaica doesn’t know that people were paying their loans,” Gray-Baker expressed to The Gleaner yesterday, adding that many debtors who put up land or property as collateral had second loans taken out on the titles by employees of the financial institutions, unbeknownst to them.

She pointed to the testimony of Dr Omar Davies, who was in charge of the finance portfolio at the time, that innumerable violations were identified within failed financial institutions, some of which, the Government was advised, would have led to criminal charges in jurisdictions with more rigorous financial legislation.

Gray-Baker pointed to debtors who, she said, committed suicide because of the meltdown and the circumstances surrounding it.

“He [Dr Clarke] has not addressed the debtors … . They don’t want all of this information to come out, as well as the different politicians who reaped from all of this and those whose loans got written off. They should have produced a report and its findings but they can’t, because it would implicate a lot of them,” she said.

She said members of both the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) benefited from the crisis, pointing to reports of a senior JLP member who bought a house lost by one of the debtors in upper St Andrew.

“When the journalist asked him about it, he said it was not him who was buying the house, it was his wife,” she said.

Equally, Gray-Baker said, after she and her husband were “thrown” out of their house in another upper St Andrew community, the property was acquired by a member of a popular PNP family.

Debtors lost properties following the sale of the bad debt portfolio to the Jamaica Re-Development Foundation (JRF), which Gray-Barker said charged interest on the debt.

‘WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY?’

In a written submission to the FINSAC Commission of Enquiry in November 2009, Davies said there were no guidelines given to the entity on how it was to have disposed of the assets of debtors, except for a request or a moratorium of a certain period to allow those clients who had reached an agreement with FINSAC but had not been able to complete arrangements for financing prior to the transfer.

Further, he said, after the sale of the bad debt portfolio, the Ministry of Finance had no direct influence over the actions of the JRF.

“However, it was assumed that, since JRF was a commercial operation, they would be sensitive to changes in the market,” Davies said then.

Gray-Baker said the arrangement was that, for every property sold by JRF, 15 per cent of the sale was to be given back to the Jamaican government.

“So, when Clarke is talking about they had to do this (FINSAC Commission Archive) because they did not have money; what happened to all the money from Jamaica Re-Development Foundation? We had no agreement with Jamaica Re-Development Foundation; we had no loans with them,” she said.

“My husband borrowed $10 million; he paid back $52 million. After that, they said he owed $87 million. These are all the things I need to see them address. They can’t just put it on a website and go away and say that’s it. They must do the report. They have enough information to do a report. They are covering up,” Gray-Baker charged.

“It is unacceptable because he [Clarke] has not addressed the debtors, which still gives the impression that these people borrowed money and never paid it back… So, what Clarke is saying here is, at worse, camera time. Tell him to address the debtors and what they went through, because, up to today, they are still suffering.”

The Ministry of Finance on Thursday launched the FINSAC Commission Archives following a years-long row between successive administrations and the FINSAC commissioners over additional funds to complete a report.

The Jamaican government spent over $160 million over a 10-year period for the report that was never produced.

On Thursday, Clarke said the information gathered during the FINSAC Commission of Enquiry was handed over to the government in 2019.

The raw and, in some cases, redacted information was released on the finance ministry’s website on Thursday.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com