Gov’t to Publish FINSAC Commission Archives

The Government will publish on a specially curated website the FINSAC Commission Archives comprising all of the evidence provided and the submissions made to the FINSAC Commission.

This was announced by Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Dr. the Hon. Nigel Clarke, who said this will be done as soon as is “practicably possible”.

“All of this archived data will be put out in volumes, in chapters, in folders, and made available to the public in perpetuity,” he indicated.

Dr. Clarke made the announcement while opening the 2024/25 Budget Debate in the House of Representatives on Tuesday (March 12).

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 is, particularly, 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.

Dr. Clarke said on publication of the Archives, the Finance Ministry will issue a special call for scholarly research into these for the purposes of producing scholarly articles and books.

“Everything that they handed over will be uploaded as is; we want to make sure that the lessons, whatever they are, are learnt. So, we want to say ‘look, [this is] open to researchers here and abroad; here’s a grant for a million dollars, for five hundred thousand dollars, et cetera, to produce a report’,” he said

He said the Finance Ministry, working in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport and the Screen Development Initiative, will also issue a special call to the creative community for proposals for documentaries on the financial sector collapse.

Dr. Clarke further indicated that there will be a special call to the creative community for proposals for a theatrical production on the financial sector collapse, its causes and effects, produced from the FINSAC Commission Archives.

The Minister said more details will be provided following the publishing of the Archives.

“The material gathered by the Commission consists of contributions from then government officials, economists, academics, former leaders of failed financial institutions, customers of those institutions, including those who found themselves with ballooning debts, among many other stakeholders.

“Their perspectives on a defining period of the Jamaican [history] need to be made available to the public. We owe it to the victims of that era, to ourselves, and to future generations to do our best to record for posterity the evidence gathered from the Commission, make it publicly available, and have it inspire the production of research reports and cultural creative output. But the cost of achieving this cannot be a constantly escalating one,” he said.

The Minister pointed out that 2025 will mark 30 years since the establishment of Fiscal Institution Services Limited, the precursor to FINSAC, which was set up to implement the Scheme of Arrangement, pursuant to the Temporary Management of the failed Blaise and Century Financial entities.

Dr. Clarke emphasised that the FINSAC period was a defining one in Jamaica’s economic life, noting that this was a financial sector crisis of a scale rarely seen globally, adding that, “it cost 40 per cent of GDP”.

“By comparison, the global financial crisis of 2009, in which global banks collapsed, cost the United States nine per cent of GDP. Our financial sector crisis was five times worse than the impact of the worst global financial crisis in 100 years in the United States,” he noted.

The Minister pointed out that “tens of thousands of businesses failed and hundreds of thousands of individuals were adversely affected. Thousands lost homes, lost their livelihoods, and some lost their lives”.

“The FINSAC crisis plunged Jamaica into deeper macro instability and resulted in a rapid build-up in our debt ratio that has taken us 30 years to reduce. It had the effect of obliterating opportunities as, for decades, interest costs consumed national resources,” Dr. Clarke said.

Between 2009 and 2017, approximately $150 million was allocated to the Commission.