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Analysis by RICKEY SINGH

SINCE STATE INTERVENTION in Trinidad and Tobago against CLICO and its financial groups to protect investors and policy holders, three other CARICOM governments have successfully moved to the courts to place this regional conglomerate under judicial orders in the management of its assets and funds.

They are The Bahamas, Guyana and Belize. It is not known whether, in the spirit of regional cooperation, any of the four administrations, starting with Trinidad and Tobago's, considered it relevant to signal a confidential alert to the others of proposed interventions against CLICO and its subsidiaries which have significant financial involvement in regional economies.

Perhaps in the older days, when our regional leaders were more sensitive to maintaining good personal relations and worked the phones on a first-name basis to share ideas and even confidential information in the interest of the objectives of CARICOM, the gesture of an alert on CLICO may well have occurred.

In today's environment, however, where the attitudes and policies of some of our CARICOM leaders sustain tensions and endanger good personal relations, it is little wonder that for all the agonising, over threatened negative consequences of the global financial and economic crisis for our region, no special, extraordinary or emergency meeting of Heads of Government has taken place.

Indeed, one proposed heads meeting for January 31 in Barbados, to follow a scheduled meeting of the Council for Finance and Planning (COFAP), was suddenly cancelled. Surprisingly, there was also a low level of attendance by most of the finance ministers, a few of them Heads of Government, among them host Prime Minister David Thompson.

The finance ministers of Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica were also absent.

The CLICO financial "explosion" was followed with more horrors by the financial scandal that erupted over the operations of the business empire of American multi-billionaire Sir Allen Stanford that provoked more than shivers not just in Antigua and Barbuda - his central base - but across the sub-region of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

Questions to be raised

Serious questioning of the functioning of regulations governing banking and insurance corporations were to be raised with inevitable allusions to political hanky-panky that had to be ignored in preference for a special meeting, initiated on the basis of a mandate by the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union.

Arrangements for today's scheduled meeting in Barbados, was taking place yesterday to involve the leaders, central bank governors and financial services regulators of the OECS, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

There could be no confirmation whether Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who had earlier agreed to be present, will be in attendance.

It has not escaped attention that while plans were underway for today's meeting in Barbados on the need to review financial regulatory systems in the Eastern Caribbean, the former three-term Barbadian Prime Minister, Owen Arthur, was speaking at a public forum in Guyana on Small States In Stormy Weather.

He spared no punches in his analysis for either the movers and shakers of so-called stimulus prescriptions in response to the spreading financial and economic crisis, with its origin in the United States, or CARICOM's failures to meet and seek collective remedies to the problems and challenges in the community's financial services sector.

As Arthur sees it, "the present global crisis warrants a fundamental change in the institutions for global economic governance", he argued, concluding that "it is to enter the theatre of the absurd to believe that structured defects of the existing magnitude can be corrected merely by adding a stimulus to existing activity. . . ."

Later came his verbal swipe at a perceived CARICOM "inertia" that "now seems to have invaded our region".

This inertia, according to Arthur, who played a sustained high profile role as CARICOM head with lead responsibility for CSME-readiness arrangements, "has most profoundly taken the form of the virtual suspension of the programme to create the CARICOM Single Economy . . . .

"We have lost a year," he said, and warned that "the consequences for the region are and will be adverse, as can be illustrated by reference to the current situation that has evolved in the region's financial sector . . . ."

Those are certainly not words of music to the ears of former political colleagues and opponents currently running governments across our Caribbean community. Some of them may well resent the scenario he has presented. Question is whether Arthur is right or wrong?

Source: Nation Newspaper of March 4, 2009.
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