FINSAC Commission Archives to Be Launched

The FINSAC Commission Archives are expected to be launched in the coming days, says Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Dr. the Hon. Nigel Clarke.

He made the announcement while closing the debate on the first supplementary estimates for fiscal year 2024/25 in the House of Representatives on Tuesday (October 15).

“Later this week, we plan to launch the FINSAC Commission Archives which will make available to the public the documents submitted to the FINSAC Commission. This symbolically comes at a time when Jamaica has reached a stage where our debt is lower than it was prior to the FINSAC era. It is only right and just that we draw a line under this period by providing the documents,” the Minister said.

He stated, however, that these do not include personal information apart from the persons who appeared before the Commission and testified in public, and whose accounts were already carried in the newspaper.

“The release is to help us to close the chapter, learn the lessons from it and ensure that those lessons we keep for a long time and we never ever traverse this course again, because FINSAC levied on this country debt that represented 40 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) that took more than a generation, approximately 30 years, to resolve,” Dr. Clarke said.

He indicated that provisions have been made in the first supplementary estimates to invite persons to conduct research.

“In releasing this data to the public, it’s important that we also make some provision for some research to be done that can help us learn from this period. So the supplementary estimates also include amounts of $10 million each to provide to the University of Technology and the University of the West Indies… to interact with the data, to have a transparent process of inviting people to compete for research funds and to do some research on the FINSAC archives,” Dr. Clarke said.

He acknowledged that the institutions “don’t need our funding to do that”, pointing out that “anybody can look at the archives and produce their own paper”.

“What we are only looking to do is to stimulate such activity and do so equitably,” Dr. Clarke added.

The first supplementary estimates for financial year 2024/25, which were approved by the House on Tuesday, provide for an increase in total government expenditure and payments by approximately $40.7 billion to $1.38 trillion.

The FINSAC Commission was established on January 12, 2009, and tasked to, among other things, examine the circumstances leading to the collapse of several financial institutions during the 1990s.

This, particularly, is in relation to (i) the extent to which these circumstances were directly influenced by domestic or external factors; (ii) Government’s fiscal and monetary policies; (iii) the management practices and role of the Board of Directors of the failed institutions; and (iv) the performance of Government’s regulatory functions.

During his opening 2024/25 Budget Debate presentation in the House of Representatives in March, Dr. Clarke announced that the Government will publish on a specially curated website, the FINSAC Commission Archives comprising all of the evidence provided and submissions made to the FINSAC Commission.