The Anguilla United Front Government held its first town hall meeting at Sandy Hill, in the district of the Elected Member for District 2, Mrs. Cora Richardson Hodge (Minister of Home Affairs), on Sunday evening, August 30.
The meeting was presided over by Mr. Fritz Smith, Chairman of the party. The speakers were Mrs. Richardson-Hodge, her Assistant in the Ministry, Mrs. Evalie Bradley; Chief Minister, Mr. Victor Banks; and Mr. Evans McNiel Rogers, Minister of Social Development including Education and Health.
Chief Minister Banks spoke on a number of financial and economic development matters under his portfolio.
One of the matters he addressed was the continued conservatorship of the National Bank of Anguilla and the Caribbean Commercial Bank by the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. He said among other things that one of the options the Anguilla Government was pursuing towards a solution of the local banking problem was the capital financing of the two banks by the Caribbean Development Bank by between 25 and 35 million US dollars.
Mr. Banks continued: “What a number of persons within the community want is for me, and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, to release the report on NBA and CCB. It is an internal report done by the [Central] Bank to deal with the issue that we are handling right now with the indigenous banks. That’s a report done on the situation on August 13 [2003].
“The report is owned by the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank for their internal purposes. It includes information about customers of the banks who do not necessarily have anything to do with the issue that affected the banks. It is a general research that has been done to determine what the situation is in the banking sector at this time. It has confidential information and that is the basis on which banks operate.
“I cannot take a hundred and fifty-five-page-report from an internal document from the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and give it to the press to interpret in a manner that they want to interpret it. That is an internal document that will not be released. Unless the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank says to me that you can release the document, which I am confident they will never want to do, in the interest of taking this matter forward, I will not be in a position to do so.
“The other report that they have been talking about, is the forensic report. By the way, that report I just mentioned – the report on NBA and CCB – is a report that I received approximately two weeks ago. When they were asking me to hand over the report, I never had a copy of it. I got that copy about two weeks ago – just shortly after carnival.
“The forensic report…was a very preliminary report. It shouldn’t even been called a forensic report. A forensic report means that a crime has been committed. You will hear later from the persons – the contractors who did that report – that that report is not a forensic report. It is what is called ‘an agreed-upon procedural report’ that is done on the request of the principals involved in regulation for an understanding of what may have taken place at the banks.
“Of course, the conclusions of this forensic report [is] that there is no smoking gun about anybody who was involved in the bank. The basic conclusions of the report simply say that what happened in the banks is primarily a result of the recession and the decrease of the underlying …security… to cover the loans that were made by the banks. The loans may have been made primarily on the basis of security rather than the customers’ ability to repay. What it is saying is that there should have been more focus on the customers’ ability to repay: in some cases relying on the amount of security. At the time of the borrowing, the customers’ security might have been worth a hundred thousand dollars but, when the recession hit, that security would have fallen to forty thousand dollars or thirty thousand dollars or fifty, sixty thousand dollars. So it means that the security is less than the loan and, as a consequence, the loan is in some ways impaired or non-performing. So those are issues that we are dealing with. It is not fair for us to try to ‘crimalise’ anybody because they were ambitious enough to go to the banks and borrow money to create business opportunities, jobs and so forth within this economy because they felt they were in a position to do so.”
Chief Minister Banks added: “Nobody in Anguilla on the list of non-performing loans does not want to pay. They cannot pay because of their economic situation; they cannot pay because they lost jobs; and they cannot meet their collateral requirements because of the value of their assets…Those are the reasons.
“Everybody wants to lock up somebody. We are not here to lock up anybody. We are here to solve the situation in the banks. Afterwards, if there is somebody that has committed some criminal act, and there are grounds for that, then that could be done by the courts. Our job, as a Government, is to stabilise the economy [and the banks].”
