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Economy firewall malfunctions – part 2

Introduction
During the past week, I received the Bank of Guyana (BOG) Report for the first half of 2009 which the bank is required under the law to submit to the Minister of Finance. As usual the report is comprehensive, contains valuable economic data, is very professionally written and therefore considered generally quite reliable. I will take into account the contents of that report as I continue my review of the 2009 mid-year report of the Minister of Finance, but before doing so, let me draw attention to certain matters touched on last week that are also addressed in the BOG report.

The first and perhaps the most important relates to performance of the economy in the first six months of the year. The Minister of Finance reported in unambiguous terms that the economy declined in 2009 by 1.4%, supporting this in Appendix A1 of his report, sourced to the Bureau of Statistics. The Bank of Guyana on the other hand, reports, both in narrative form and in a graph, a positive growth of an identical percentage and projects that the economy will “continue to grow during the second half of the year.”

There is an obvious conflict between the numbers and it is disappointing that the Minister of Finance did not detect the discrepancy on such a fundamental matter, given that the BOG’s half-year report is submitted to him. This failure suggests either gross carelessness, or, heaven forbid, that the Minister did not read the BOG report, both of which would be sad indeed. The country would no doubt expect a clarification from one or both of the parties responsible for these reports.

Another issue is the different approaches to inflation. While the BOG uses the identical percentage of 1.3% reported by the Minister of Finance, its report describes the inflation number specifically as the Georgetown Urban Consumer Price Index which is obviously different from a national inflation rate. The Minister of Finance on the other hand, was not as specific and importantly, gave only an estimate of inflation, inevitably inviting speculation about the margin of error.

In last week’s column, there was a comment that sugar was becoming the scapegoat for the poor performance of the economy with its field workers being increasingly blamed not only for the industry’s, but also the country’s economic woes. The BOG report offers some perspective. While the number of work stoppages increased by 22.9% to 102 from 83 in the corresponding period last year, the number of man days lost was only 18,785 compared with 33,389 in half-year 2008, a 44% drop in production days lost.

The BOG also informs us that exports to the European Union accounted for 97.5% of Guysuco’s exports, up from 91.7% in 2008. For all the noise that the President made about the EPA and its adverse effects on sugar prices, our dependence on the EU market in 2009 was practically total, despite the corporation’s attempt at market diversification. It would seem unfair to place that at the feet of the field workers.

Expenditure
When the 2009 National Budget was presented earlier this year it was followed by the usual chorus of the biggest budget ever, no consideration given to the absorptive capacity of the economy. Business Page of November 16 last year in commenting on the expenditure side of the 2008 mid-year report, noted that it was “a matter of speculation why only 38% of the full year budget has been expended on what a table in the report described as key sectors.” That column went on to draw attention to the Health, Infrastructure and Agriculture sectors where only 41%, 27% and 33% respectively, had been spent in the first half of the year and asked whether the country was “going to see a mad and irresponsible rush to spend during the second half of the year, simply because the money has been allocated.” That indeed is what appears to have taken place in 2008.

Mid-year expenditure of Key Sectors – G$ million

2009.11.29_Table1

Source: Mid Year Report 2009
Note: H1 refers to the first six months.

As the table above shows, we are faced with a very similar situation in 2009, even as the number of sectors identified as “key” is reduced from nine in 2008 to five in 2009. Those excluded this year are Culture, Office of the President, Public Service Ministry and Social Welfare for which billions were allocated in the 2009 Budget. The Minister’s report did not indicate why he considered that these were no longer “key” and his discussion was therefore more than limited in this regard. In 2008 the expenditure on the Minister’s key sectors in 2008 accounted for 37% of the full-year budget allocation, compared with 34.6% this year. Yet, the Minister did not think it necessary to make any significant adjustment to the full-year projections, in fact marginally increasing the total non-interest budget expenses for the full year. If technical and administrative skills are regarded as critical to delivering on the 2009 Budget programmes, it is difficult to see how those programmes could be achieved given that there is no greater implementation capacity in the second half 2009 than in the first half.

Many of the numbers speak for themselves but with all the contracts being awarded, the almost daily appearances in the press of some of the ministers and the extent to which we have committed the country to borrowings, it is difficult to understand the low spending on these sectors, particularly given that several line items are of a fixed and constant nature. To put the figures in context, it means that Agriculture would have to spend in the current half of 2009 four dollars for every dollar spent in the first half. The same applies to Infrastructure, while for Education and Housing and Water it is a more modest $1.5 for every dollar.

The drug bonanza
Health is interesting. Successive annual reports from the Audit Office remind us that cabinet has hand-picked for unlawful but very lucrative, multi-billion procurement contracts to supply the government with drugs and medical supplies, one of the companies of the Ramroop Group, with which President Jagdeo announced he has a friendly relationship and for which new tax concession laws were passed in 2008. As if the selection by the President’s cabinet were not enough, the government makes up-front payment on those contracts. Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, of the $2.5 billion budgeted for Drugs and Medical Supplies, 66.5 % was spent in the first six months of the year, up from 53% for the corresponding period in 2008.

With this kind of abuse, the government ought not to be surprised that Guyana is ranked at 126 among 180 countries listed in the Transparency International (TI) Report, along with seven other countries that include war-ravaged countries such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mozambique and Uganda. The government’s protestations about TI’s methodology would have credibility and resonance if the country was convinced that it had any interest in halting the abuses attendant on the procurement of drugs and other products and services and the Lotto funds, pursuing those who contribute to its party while engaging in the worst forms of corruption of revenue officers, keeping its promise on a Freedom of Information Act and observing good governance and the rule of law in all their forms and manifestations.

With corruption and the absence of any culture of accountability and transparency in religion, the trade union movement, civil society, the private and NGO sectors, the political parties, sports, in national and local government – in short in every area of life – many Guyanese find it hard to believe that there are countries more corrupt than Guyana. The fact is, however, that there are and we need to ensure that we do not slip further to the bottom. Like the rotting of the fish, the disintegration from corruption begins at the head.

Bloating the public sector
Another interesting line item is what is referred to in Appendix E4 to the Mid-year Report as Contracted Employees. There too we have spending very much on track as the government selectively employs more and more persons at the public expense. The 2009 Budget allocation for wages and salaries of contracted employees is $3.2 billion which the Minister projects will be exceeded, no doubt because more than 50% has already been spent in the first six months of the year. The Office of the President in particular now has a number of advisers and consultants, some of whose designations and functions are by no means clear, and who seem to be paid either for their past service to the party or to do political work on behalf of the party. The contracted employees do not come cheap. Some of them are paid in real currency, have 24-hour security, chauffeur, administrative support, enjoy valuable tax and duty concessions – all paid for by the poor taxpayers or financed by the donors who seem to be salivating at the prospect of giving to a poor country.

How much of the further $2.2 billion dollars in benefits and allowances goes to the contracted employees is not determinable but what is interesting is that the wages and salaries of the contracted employees exceeds that of the total administrative staff of the central government by more than 15%. And it is because of these contracted employees including permanent secretaries, many politically appointed, that the Public Service Commission is becoming increasingly sidelined and irrelevant. Is it because of the chauffeur-driven and state-provided vehicles that the Public Service Ministry has not seen it fit or necessary to revise the 1995 rates of travel allowances paid to public officers, many of them lower level operatives not important to the new order governing public finances in the country?

To be continued

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Economy firewall malfunctions

Today Business Page begins a short series on the Mid-year Report 2009 which the Minister of Finance is required to submit to the National Assembly under the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act, 2003.

Introduction
Despite the President’s assurance that he had constructed a “firewall” – a term used to refer to the prevention of unauthorised intrusion into a computerised system – to protect the economy from the recession which had hit the world economic system, the Guyana economy contracted by 1.4% during the first half of 2009 (H/Y). This is according to the mid-year report presented to the National Assembly by Dr Ashni Singh, Minister of Finance on November 12, 2009, more than ten weeks after its legal due date and five days after this column had lamented the financial lawlessness that now characterises the Jagdeo/Singh economic management team. The firewall was only able to promote and permit growth in the half-year in two of the fifteen economic sectors when compared with their performance in the first half of 2008. The sectors which show improvement being forestry which grew in H/Y 2009 by 0.3% compared with a decline of 23% in the corresponding period in 2008, and manufacturing which moved from a decline of 3% in H/Y 2008 to 0% in the same period in 2009. Although the great majority of sectors performed poorly, the Minister of Finance who also controls the Bureau of Statistics which compiles the national statistics constituting his report, reported half-year growth in the non-sugar sector of 1.1% compared with a 4% growth for the same period in 2008. As Bill Clinton would say, It’s sugar, Stupid.

Obviously disregarding current developments in the sector, the report projects sugar to boost overall economic performance in the second half of 2009, reversing its own 20% decline in half-year 2009 to a 10% overall 2009 growth, and thereby spectacularly transforming the economy’s half-year decline of 1.4% to a full year 2.5% growth for the entire year. Once again, the Bureau of Statistics will have its work cut out, but more significantly, despite the government’s two-decade attempt at diversification of the economy, sugar remains the economy’s backbone, lifeblood, and increasingly its scapegoat. The projected growth in sugar and therefore the rest of the economy must be encouraging for the main sugar union GAWU as it enters into government-imposed wages arbitration with the state owned GuySuco.

2009.11.22_Chart1

Source: Minister of Finance Mid-Year Report 2009

And even the improved performance in the two sectors may not bode too well after all. Under the Guyana-Norway LCDS Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) addressed in this column last week, the country may not be able to optimally exploit our forested areas that cover 80% of the country. That understanding brings those areas under international supervision bordering on control, in return for a six-year grant from the Norwegians of potentially US $250 million – hardly a good return on what President Jagdeo has described as our greatest asset. Because the report was said to have been written before the signing of the MOU, it does not contain any reference to that agreement, including the immediate potential implications. Hopefully, that is not overlooked as the Guyana-Norway agreement is for specified funds for a limited period.

With respect to manufacturing, let us recall that the explanation given by the Minister last year for the manufacturing sector recording what economists like to refer to as negative growth, was partly the high cost of inputs – fuel and imported raw materials. The question whether the manufacturing sector is a mere price taker would be very interesting indeed for consideration by the Minister of Finance, the leaders of the sector and those who continue to call for any and every tax concession ever conceived. It must also be of some irony and concern that the Vice-Chairman of the Private Sector Commission and a lead private sector person on the Jagdeo-led National Competitiveness Strategy Programme, Mr Ramesh Dookhoo, is the current head of the Guyana Manufacturers Association.

It is surely not too early to ask President Jagdeo and Mr Dookhoo to show how the over five-and-a-half billion dollars borrowed from the IDB are benefiting the country, in the light of the reverse-stop-go performance of the economy. Just to put Norway’s potential contribution into context, the NCS loan is 90% of the first year LCDS payment. I do not know if the lender, the IDB pays any attention to the work done by the National Competitiveness Council but what is on the NCS website is what one would hardly expect from busy politicians and their overpaid consultants and experts.

2009.11.22_Table1

Source: Mid-year Report 2009

As usual the report does not bother to deal with several key issues relevant to the economy and the only mention the Clico fiasco warrants is a boast that “the government’s timely intervention in placing the company under judicial management has helped to contain the impact of the company’s difficulties.” It does not appear to have been recognised or accepted that had the government’s intervention been before and not after the virtual collapse of the company’s Trinidad parent, then the country would not have lost a gross sum of tens of millions of US dollars. The report offers no assurance of when Clico’s depositors and policy-holders will receive the money guaranteed by the ever-promising President. Those include the National Insurance Scheme and thousands of others who did not benefit from the serendipitous payout by Clico just prior to its downfall. Nor does it address the new arrangements for the insurance sector that has now been placed under the Bank of Guyana, the very institution that along with the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance contributed in no small measure to the demise of Clico. It is timely to note as well that the hurriedly drafted amendment is likely to create more juridical problems than the administrative weaknesses it is intended to cure. The entire functions of the Commissioner of Insurance have been transferred to the Bank of Guyana and unless the bank creates a similarly named position it is a fair inference that the position has been abolished.

It would have been good too if the Minister had spent some time telling the country about the state of tax reform which has become another annual promise, the progress to stem money-laundering, the state of the National Insurance Scheme given its exposure to Clico, legislation dealing with the New Building Society that according to the President has reached its lending limit, the (President’s) $2 billion promise to the housing sector for the vulnerable groups in our society and his billion dollar mangrove project and Dr Singh’s understanding of the reasons for the sharp decline in the performance of the distribution sector, from 11% in both halves of 2008 to a mere 3% in half-year 2009. Or is it that the Minister considers this and the reported Bureau of Statistics’ “estimate” of inflation in half year 2009 of 1.3% adequately dealt with by his assessment of consumers’ exercise of “caution and prudence”? I have to confess that is a novel if not unique explanation for depressed spending power in the national economy.

To be continued

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Financial lawlessness on the increase

The Fiscal Management and Accountability Act, 2003 (FMAA), along with the Integrity Commission Act and the Audit Act, are often advertised by the government as proof of its commitment to transparency and accountability. This trilogy of legislation is underpinned and intended to give effect to a constitutional provision for the proper accounting of public moneys. To prevent any doubt about what public moneys means the FMAA defines it as “all moneys belonging to the State received or collected by officials in their official capacity including tax and non-tax revenue collections authorised by law and… grants to the Government…”. That clearly includes money from Lotto and privatisation and any funds received from the Norwegians and other sources towards the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS).

Not only that. The various acts referred to above are all part of the commitment of the Government of Guyana to the international donor community – the IMF, the World Bank, the IDB, the EU, Canada, the US and others – for good governance including transparency in accounting, in exchange for financial support. The Minister of Finance is the member of the Cabinet designated by law for ensuring that the constitutional and statutory requirements are complied with and is empowered by the act to take punitive action against those who breach its provisions. Having played a major role in the passage of the accountability legislation, the donors are assumed to be familiar with the main provisions of the legislation and must therefore be aware of the major infractions of the legislation by the very Minister bound to ensure compliance.

Spend, baby spend
The national budget continues to grow at a considerable rate helped by VAT producing immoral windfalls to the government. With a penchant for huge numbers and throwing money after problems, for President Jagdeo the policy has been ‘spend, baby spend.’ Like the World Cup money and the flood funds, accountability and audit will come later, if at all. No one would have identified Dr Ashni Singh, Minister of Finance with the ‘spend, baby spend’ attitude, or given his background as a professionally qualified accountant and former Deputy Auditor General, have expected that he would treat accountability and the audit of the books of the state with such disdain. It is neither excusable nor understandable.

Yet Dr Ashni Singh has breached several of the statutory duties and professional obligations imposed on him in defiance of public opinion and the rule of law, and confident of no warning letter from the President, his political boss. Dr Singh’s apparent contempt for good governance and accountability makes many hesitate to support the LCDS which places the centre of the LCDS in the Office of the President, the very office that now unconstitutionally (mis)appropriates the Lotto Funds, using it for all sorts of improper purposes at the fancy of the President.

Lotto
Article 217 of the Constitution of Guyana – the country’s supreme law – requires that “all revenues or other moneys raised or received by Guyana (not being revenues or other moneys that are payable, by or under an Act of Parliament, into some other fund established for any specific purpose or that may, by or under such an Act, be retained by the authority that received them for the purpose of defraying the expenses of that authority) shall be paid into and form one Consolidated Fund.” I do not believe that the term “for any specific purpose” can be interpreted so widely as to allow an Act of Parliament to defeat the main constitutional objective to ensure that moneys coming in to the state go only into the Consolidated Fund and any spending done out of that Fund is on the basis of appropriations by the National Assembly.

In defiance of the constitution the 24% of gross takings collected by the government from the Guyana Lottery Company are made available to the President who seems to exercise total control of how it is spent with only any unspent balance being put into the Consolidated Fund. I have heard this practice defended under the second parenthetical exception to Article 217 and that the money should go to the Government Lotteries Control Committee under the Government Lotteries Act Cap. 80:07. That argument in my view falls at the first hurdle since that act deals only with lotteries “organised and conducted by the Government Lotteries Control Committee.” The Lotto Funds as they are infamously referred to, represent the government’s share of the gross takings from a private lottery run under a contract between the Canadian operator and the government. It is a tax/levy and should rightly go straight into the Consolidated Fund. The President’s misuse of these funds is a clear breach of the constitution which he has taken an oath to uphold, while the failure by the Minister of Finance to bring these moneys into the Consolidated Fund constitutes a dereliction of his duty and obligation and contrary to section 48 of the FMAA which makes it unlawful for any minister or official to misuse, misapply, or improperly dispose of public moneys.

The mid-year report
The Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 imposes on the Minister a mandatory duty to present to the National Assembly, no later than August 30 of the half year, a report on the year-to-date execution of the annual budget and the prospects for the remainder of the year. This column has been at pains to point out that not only is the Minister in breach of this statutory duty with regard to timing, but even when he belatedly submits the report, it is frequently misdated to minimise the delay and omits key information prescribed by the act. The act requires the report to include “an update on the current macroeconomic and fiscal situation, a revised economic outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, and a statement of the projected impact that these trends are likely to have on the annual budget for the current fiscal year.”

This is a practical proposition and the report should comment on emerging issues such as the alleged $300 million fraud at the GRA, the President’s $2 billion housing fund for the vulnerable, the gains from the LCDS and any unbudgeted expenditure incurred in the first half of the year. This kind of information is not only for the business community and the citizenry but also the kind of information any Finance Minister as the country’s Chief Finance Officer needs for his short-term planning.

Unintended consequences
The delay by the Minister causes the Bank of Guyana (BoG) to delay the publication of its own half-year report until the Minister releases his. I understand the BoG’s report has been ready for some time and while the Bank is an independent statutory body, it comes within the ministerial control of the Finance Minister, a choice between losing its reputation for independence and offending the Minister.

A similar situation exists with the Bureau of Statistics. This entity has received several millions of dollars to enhance its professional competence and secure its independence. I think it was in 1991 that an act was passed to make the bureau a body corporate, independent and effective. The minister responsible for the act is the Minister of Finance who in the absence of a chairman appointed by him is automatically the chairman. There is nothing to indicate that a board was ever appointed and by default the bureau remains as a unit of the Ministry of Finance, mistakenly described on its website as a “Government of Guyana Agency.” It should not therefore come as a surprise that the bureau is far from effective in how it carries out its mandate, selectively choosing if and when to publish important statistical information, a decision apparently not unrelated to the wishes of the Minister.

Perhaps more out of frustration than from a practical consideration a source close to the Bank of Guyana has suggested that these two bodies should report direct to the National Assembly. This may very well be a suggestion that the Speaker of the National Assembly or the Public Accounts Committee may wish to take up, even if in the first instance it is done privately. What is clear is that the failure of these bodies to discharge their statutory duties does little to contradict those who argue that what Guyana has is paper accountability only.

The Office of the Auditor General
Not only is this office subject to its own act but it is also a constitutional body with serious responsibilities and functions. One of the first but fundamental points to note about the head of this office is that the constitution makes no provision for an acting Auditor General and the job description clearly requires a professionally qualified accountant. In fact the incumbent has no such qualification and it would be a travesty for him to be appointed substantively to the position. It may be convenient for the government to have him there, but surely it is dangerous for the taxpayers of the country and severely compromises the quality of its reports. By retaining him the government is aware that the real authority in the Audit Office is no less a person than the spouse of the Minister of Finance. It is hard to believe that neither of them nor anyone in the government, nor in the international donor community that keeps putting money into the Office, recognises this obvious conflict of interest or simply is not interested even in token accountability.

Even with that major weakness the Audit Office is operating at half its required manpower and this helps to explain why it keeps falling back and down on many of its public commitments. Like the Minister of Finance’s mid-year report, the Audit Office’s report on the Government accounts for 2008 is also late. By law this must be submitted to the National Assembly within nine months of the end of the accounting year. We are now in the eleventh month without any word about when this report will be available.

One of the mandates of the Office is to conduct Value-For-Money (VFM) audits and it must now be coming on to a year or more since the Office has been due to issue its report on a VFM audit conducted on the financially miniscule Palms.

Even with expensive Canadian assistance the Office has been unable to deliver. VFM audits are of less value where the expenditure is unavoidable, as it is with the Palms, the main expenditure on which comprises staffing (it is understaffed) and meals (which are as low-cost as one can get). VFMs are useful in the case of discretionary expenditure such as Cabinet Outreach and the choice of newspapers for government advertisements. With weak and compromised leadership, the Office is clearly not in a position to deliver on its mandate.

Conclusion
Transparency and accountability are not esoteric or theoretical concepts but are practical, part of the democratic landscape and help to ensure that money is properly accounted for and sensibly spent. Our national budget exceeds $100 billion and if we take the most conservative estimate of 10% as lost through poor financial management, the country loses $10 billion per year. Think what that can do to reduce taxation or enhance social spending. The Minister of Finance has a wonderful opportunity to redeem his reputation.

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The Insurance (Supplementary Provisions) Bill 2009

I note that the Minister of Finance Dr. Ashni Singh has introduced legislation [The Insurance (Supplementary Provisions) Bill 2009] that will bring the functions of the Commissioner of Insurance (CoI) under the Bank of Guyana (BoG). The Explanatory Memorandum states that the “Bill seeks to pave the way for the Bank of Guyana (not the Commissioner of Insurance) to administer the Insurance Act and for a person nominated by the Bank to be appointed by the Court as judicial manager.” Because it was the first reading of the Bill, the Minister was not required to nor did he otherwise give any reason for this move which is not without considerable significance. Such a move would however have been helpful in alerting parliamentarians and the public of the thinking behind the legislation and directing their minds to the kind of preparation they should begin in order to contribute meaningfully to the progress of the legislation.

The Clico meltdown exposed in a rather dramatic and disastrous fashion some of the weaknesses of the existing legislation and its operations. But it also emphasised the need for a more exhaustive examination by an impartial body of the causes of the debacle and the steps necessary to better regulate the insurance sector and prevent similar failures in the future. Without the benefit of that exercise, I can only rely on my experience of the Insurance Act in relation to audits, revelations about Clico as well as – let’s not forget – the GuyFlag/Fidelity story in offering any opinions. Those suggest that what we need are fundamental changes both to the regulatory framework as well as how it operates. The proposed Bill falls very short.

The only change being made by the Bill is the transfer of responsibility for the supervision of the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance from the Commissioner of Insurance to the BoG. This raises the obvious question whether the Minister really believes that that is all that is necessary to fix the system that certainly failed us in the case of Clico and serves us poorly in the case of GuyFlag/Fidelity. One assumes that the Minister would have been kept fully informed by the Commissioner of Insurance that the breaches of key provisions of the Insurance Act by Clico were putting policyholders and depositors at considerable risk. Are those addressed by this Bill? I think not.

There is only one Commonwealth Caribbean country that I know of where the insurance industry is supervised by the Central Bank – Trinidad and Tobago which coincidentally has also had the biggest failure to stakeholders, other than Guyana. In Barbados and Belize the sector is supervised by a Supervisor of Insurance operating under the Ministry of Finance. Jamaica has what I consider to be the best model and one which was recommended in Ram & McRae’s Focus on Budget 2009, i.e. a Financial Services Commission. Under that umbrella can fall responsibility for the supervision of such sectors as insurance, securities, prevention of money-laundering and even the financial institutions. That would allow the central bank to deal with its core objectives, namely “the fostering [of] domestic price stability through the promotion of stable credit and exchange conditions, as well as sound financial intermediation conducive to the growth of the economy of Guyana.”

While the Commissioner of Insurance has had to take responsibility for much of Clico’s regulatory failure, the Bank of Guyana too failed to detect that Clico was engaged in deposit-taking which required Clico to apply to the Bank for a licence under the Financial Institutions Act. In fact the disclosures surrounding financial/quasi financial institutions including Clico, the Hand-in-Hand Trust, the New Building Society and the National Insurance Scheme suggest that the Bank of Guyana has its own problems. To add to its mandate supervision for the insurance sector can compound those problems.

I hope that the Bill is a mere temporary measure until the President’s promised investigation into Clico makes more extensive and meaningful recommendations. I hope we do not have to wait too long.

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Clico, contagion, containment and concealment

If a loss of public moneys should occur and, at the time of that loss, a Minister or official has caused or contributed to that loss through misconduct or through deliberate or serious disregard of reasonable standards of care, that Minister or official shall be personally liable to the Government for the amount of the loss.

Introduction
This is a direct quote from section 49 of the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act which President Jagdeo signed into law in late December 2003. The Clico affair and related matters may be a good time to draw attention to the provision which has never been tested at the higher levels. When the dust settles, the taxpayers, NIS contributors and beneficiaries, members of pension and medical schemes and depositors in Clico and potentially in Hand-in-Hand Trust (HIHT) and the New Building Society could lose collectively several billions from the fall-out in the financial sector.

Other consequences will be equally severe, if not always as direct. Jobs will have to go. Moreover, with perhaps billions invested in Stanford Investment Bank (Stanford) by the HIHT and other so far unidentified pension schemes and individuals, their losses and their income stream − all in US dollars – will be gone. With the assertion that our economy is ring-fenced having proved naively misleading, and claims by Clico, the President, the Minister of Finance and the Commissioner of Insurance − all acknowledged as very bright persons − having proved to have been misguided at best and been guilty of misrepresentations at worst, there is a loss of confidence not only in the judgment and competence of our economic managers, but also in the independence and ability of the regulators to protect the public interest.

Last Wednesday, Ms Maria van Beek, the Commissioner of Insurance, presented a petition to the court seeking an order that Clico be wound up or alternatively, that a Judicial Manager be appointed. One day later, Ms van Beek was granted her wish by Chief Justice Ian Chang in an order returnable tomorrow, Monday, appointing her as Judicial Manager of the entity which she has supervised for more than five years. Instead of immediately issuing a statement advising affected persons – numbering tens of thousands – of the implications that flow from the order, Ms van Beek proceeded to the Office of the President for a press conference, where along with the Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh and the Governor of the Bank of Guyana (the Bank) Mr Lawrence Williams, she sat silently as the President made excuse after excuse for the failure of Clico and gave vague statements about protecting pensioners without once using the G word – guarantee − which is what people, worried about their savings, pensions, medical schemes and jobs most need.

Blame The Bahamas
President Jagdeo, who is not the responsible Minister, told the nation that it was the collapse of Clico Bahamas that triggered the action by the commissioner. Yet that is not what the commissioner said in an affidavit sworn to the court one day earlier. She said it was the business model and investment policies pursued by the company. The President, seeking to protect Ms van Beek and by extension his Minister of Finance, told the nation that the commissioner had told Clico more than one year ago that they should have regularised their investment position. So, did the commissioner write the company and then sit back as they breached the law even further? The problem with the President’s style of intervention is that at best, he does not check the accuracy and implications of the statements he makes and increasingly often, he is wrong. There is no need to remind anyone of the damage caused by such lack of respect for accuracy as we saw in the saga of tax concessions necessitating an amendment in the law to facilitate Queens Atlantic Investment Inc’s tax concessions.

In matters financial details are important and so is judgment, particularly when it involves self-serving statements. When the President assured the nation on February 5 that Clico’s assets were sufficient to meet its liabilities he was repeating a company line without having read the December 31, 2007 analysis showing that 81% of the company’s assets was invested in related parties, all of which were under various degrees of threat (SN February 7 and Business Page Feb 8 reported on this analysis). In fact as Minister-Extraordinaire he should have known that the 2008 figures had shown some deterioration, suggesting that the commissioner’s call was ineffective and/or ignored. Both he and the Minister of Finance should have wondered how a company that issued “insurance policies” with premiums running into billions of dollars only needed a statutory fund of under fifty million dollars.

Disregard for reasonable care
The disregard for reasonable care does not end with them. The nation would have expected the Commissioner of Insurance and the Bank of Guyana to recognise that those policies were investment products dressed up as insurance. It is hard to believe that such a major issue would have escaped the attention of the Bank with illustrious directors of the calibre of Drs Gobin Ganga, Prem Misir and Cyril Solomon.

Given the poor oversight exercised by the regulators in general and the Commissioner of Insurance in particular, the court would have been reluctant to appoint Ms Van Beek to manage the operations of Clico under its supervision. Her demonstrable failures to act expose her inappropriateness for such a job, or even to have been the lead regulator for an industry which also required legal expertise. The problem for the court is that the law appears to have given it little choice. Yes, the court could have made a winding up order on the ground that Clico is insolvent, and use the more practical test of “inability to pay one’s debt on demand” that may very well have been the case. But the Insurance Act makes it a bit more difficult for the court by requiring a determination of the value of a troubled company’s assets and liabilities, never an easy task even for accountants. The President compounded the difficulty by volunteering that he hoped that the entire sum from The Bahamas company would be recovered even as he failed to address the billion dollar debt owed by CRL, the Guyana forestry product subsidiary of the troubled CL Financial which has guaranteed the debt.

Once the court chose not to go with the winding-up option – though this may still happen at some time – section 68 of the act gave it no choice but to appoint the commissioner as the Judicial Manager. Apart from the fact that her past supervision of Clico inspires little confidence, and her inattention to detail was embarrassingly exposed when she wrongly identified the name of Clico in her petition, what then becomes of her statutory role and function as Commissioner of Insurance over Clico and the rest of the industry, including Fidelity, which would ordinarily require full-time attention? Additionally, there appears to be a conflict between her two roles which the court would have to consider given that the court itself is not equipped to make business judgments.

NIS
The poor NIS could stand to lose six billion dollars in investments in Clico which may not have been made in compliance with the NIS Act. This is no small change. It is the equivalent of more than 20% of earnings accumulated over forty years by the Scheme and about one year’s benefits payment. To check on the propriety of the investments, I wrote Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh a letter on February 24, pointing out that the NIS Act only allows the NIS to invest in securities approved of by the Co-operative Finance Administration (COFA) established under the Co-operative Financial Institutions. I pointed out that he is not only the Chairman of COFA but as Minister, appoints the Board of COFA. The Minister of course also appoints the Board of the NIS. I asked him the following questions:

1. The names of the persons he appointed to COFA currently serving as members of the administration, and the commencement and termination dates of their appointments.

2. The securities which COFA approved for purposes of investment.

3. Whether the NIS had sought and received approval for any investments other than those determined by the administration and if so, the securities which have been so approved.

4. Whether the administration during his tenure as Minister has ever taken the opportunity under section 4 of the act for its Chairman or Secretary to attend any meeting of the National Insurance Board, and in particular the meeting at which any decision was made by the board for any special investments.

I am awaiting his response. But if it were owing to the Minister’s “misconduct or through deliberate or serious disregard of reasonable standards of care” COFA did not approve of NIS investing in Clico the Minister would have some serious questions to answer, not to Business Page but to the nation.

To make matters worse for the NIS, Clico was allowed, even while Commissioner van Beek, the Minister of Finance, the President and the Bank of Guyana were “monitoring” the imperilled insurance company, to divest itself of $1.5 billion dollars of bonds in the Berbice Bridge Company Inc. The Board of the NIS, all the members of which are either ducking or hiding, needs to explain to the nation whether the terms of their $6 billion investment in Clico were breached by the sale of the bonds and whether the Scheme feels that its investment is any safer now.

The New Building Society
More than ten years after privately as a director of NBS and publicly as a columnist, I advocated that the country’s only building society with more than one hundred thousand persons’ savings and loans involved be brought under the supervision of the Bank of Guyana, the Bank exercises no jurisdiction over the NBS. During that time the government has drastically increased the lending limits while relaxing the conditions and security required to back the loans made. One only has to consider the Savings and Loans crisis in the US in the late eighties to appreciate the possible consequences of such laxity. But there is more to worry about. The board has also become increasingly politicized with its current Chairman being Head of the Public Service in the Office of the President and the decision about the new Head Office involving hundreds of millions of dollars being made against technical professional advice. Quietly, the NBS has been joined in the failed attempt to prevent the demise of Clico. The NBS has bought over $1.5 billion dollars of bonds in the Berbice Bridge Company Inc from Clico, and it is unlikely that this would have happened without the official agreement and sanction of the Office of the President in which both the Chairman of the NIS and the Chairman and one director of the NBS are based, or the Ministry of Finance which has to approve investment in securities issued by the Berbice Bridge Company.

The danger is obvious. The NBS with assets in excess of $30 billion is unsupervised and unregulated but subject to powerful political influences. If the bridge company which is proving the sceptics right about the hugely optimistic traffic projections, and the board, which is chaired by the Clico CEO, cannot meet its financial obligations to bondholders, $1.8 billion of the funds of the NBS – representing about 40% of its reserves – would be at risk. That is real money which added to the Head Office being constructed at a cost of approximately $800 million could pose real trouble for the society.

Once again the recurring players are the President, the Minister of Finance and the Bank of Guyana, the last-named of which has failed to assume any jurisdiction as it should have. Of course this in no way exonerates the Chairman and directors of the NBS from their fiduciary obligations.

Hand-in-Hand Trust
The President also referred at the press conference to the investments made in Stanford by the Hand-in-Hand Trust, which holds depositors’ funds and manages some of the country’s largest pension schemes. He said that in the case of the HIHT, “total current exposure” to the Stanford Group amounts to $827 million or US$4 million, in addition to $297 million or US$1.5 million invested on behalf of pension funds. He then went on to confuse the nation by referring to the direct exposure which he said represented 9 per cent of the total assets of HIHT.” Whether it is 9% or closer to 10% is less important than the fact that this is not how one measures exposure. With the head of the Bank of Guyana and the Minister of Finance sitting in at the press conference as his technical advisors, the President as an economist should know that the measure should have been total exposure of the company – direct and indirect – relative not against total assets which do not belong to the company but only to equity which does. In other words he was downplaying the problem in more than one way.

The question has also been raised whether it was permissible for the HIHT, regulated by the Bank of Guyana under the Financial Institutions Act, to place so much of its funds in a single investment – what lay persons would refer to as putting too many eggs in one basket, but which the more technically-minded Bank of Guyana would call asset concentration. In the case of the failed Globe Trust, the Bank of Guyana received more than a mild criticism from then Chief Justice Carl Singh for its poor oversight. It must now hope that by some miracle the investment by HIHT in Stanford will be recovered. If that does not happen, then the Bank can expect not only a strong rebuke but perhaps even a lawsuit.

Conclusion
Faced with a financial crisis, the first step is containment. Instead we had concealment with the consequence that it has widened and enlarged now including, with potential negative and costly consequences, the National Insurance Scheme, the New Building Society, pension schemes and savings accounts of hundreds of thousands. Confidence is also crucial but this comes only from the competence, judgement and independence of our leaders and regulators. None of these qualities has been adequately demonstrated in this instance by the President, the Minister of Finance, the Commissioner of Insurance, the Bank of Guyana, the National Insurance Scheme and the New Building Society.

The rest of the financial sector and perhaps with one exception the insurance sector all appear very solid. Every effort must be made not to contaminate them and to restore confidence in the entire system. I believe that the National Assembly needs to take an active role in this.