WE ARE in agreement with Government Senator Alfred Rattray that it is "absolutely unacceptable " that any Committee of Parliament should be hamstrung in its work by any institution of the State. Parliament is the highest authority in the land and we have indeed come to a sorry pass when an institution of the State can dare to defy the authority of Parliament.
Yet, this is what the Bank of Jamaica has done in its refusal to provide information to a Select Committee of the Senate, inquiring into the collapse of the financial sector in the 1990s.
Senator Professor Trevor Munroe is correct in his assertion that it is "scandalous that the work of the committee should in anyway be frustrated by a department of the State itself". What happened to the financial sector is a fit subject for an inquiry. This has been one of the most defining events in our recent history. Somewhere in the region of 10 banks and several insurance companies collapsed, including Mutual Life which was over 150 years old and had managed to survive world wars, the Great Depression and a host of disasters man-made and natural.
It was Opposition Senator Anthony Johnson who first proposed that the Senate should conduct an inquiry into the causes of the collapse of the financial sector. After the Senate accepted the proposal and set up a Select Committee which began to hear evidence it came up against a roadblock in the form of officials of the Bank of Jamaica who refused to provide information on the grounds that to do so would violate the provisions of the Banking Act.
But it is important that the country learns the truth about what went wrong. Particularly in the light of recent statements from the Minister of Finance Dr. Omar Davies, that the intervention by FINSAC, the Government agency that was created to restore stability to the sector will now cost the taxpayers of this country a whopping $120 billion. This latest figure is a substantial increase on what the country was originally told would be the cost of the intervention.
According to the Minister of Finance the country would be faced with an additional $20 billion of debt-servicing each year to pay for the "errors which were made in the financial sector". Which gives added impetus to the quest to know what were the errors and who made them. We urge the Senate to persist in its quest to conduct an inquiry into the reasons for the collapse of the financial sector. If individuals refuse to provide information the Senate should examine and be prepared to enforce the powers that it has to force them to do so.
The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner.
