By Hilbert Haar
The recently held meeting of the parliamentary finance committee about the situation of insurance company ENNIA and its affiliated entities showed once more how ill-prepared some politicians are for these kinds of meetings.
The Central Bank has issued extensive press releases about the ENNIA-case, yet MPs managed to asked questions to which the answers have been in the public domain for already quite some time.
Members of the committee seemed unaware of the exact role the Central Bank plays as supervisor of financial institutions and one of them (MP Frans Richardson) even questioned why the government had not rung the bell about this issue. (That’s because it is the Central Bank, not the governments of Curacao and St. Maarten that supervises financial institutions, but that notion seemed to be lost on the good MP). One could ask for the same reason why the parliament – the representative of the people and by extension of ENNIA’s policyholders – did not sound the alarm earlier. That’s all water under the bridge but it makes for good political melee.
As far as I understand this whole mess, the Central Bank has taken every step it could take to straighten out ENNIA. It met however with an unwilling counterpart – Hushang Ansary, the chairman of the Parman Group that controlled ENNIA until the Central Bank’s emergency measure put Ansary together with the ENNIA-management on ice. The Bank had to fight every step of the way to get access to multi-million dollars parked in bank accounts at Merrill Lynch in New York.
That the Mullet Bay property happens to be on the books – not with ENNIA, but with Parman’s investment vehicle ECI – gives this case of course an interesting local flavor.
When I managed the now defunct Today newspaper, one topic was off limits: Mullet Bay. It seemed a small price to pay for creating independent content for this newspaper. And besides, with a second newspaper on the island that was obviously not bound to such a restriction, Mullet Bay was basically prime meat for some investigative journalism. Why this was never done – I don’t know. The restrictions at Today obviously had everything to do with the relationship between the paper’s owner, Richard Gibson Sr., and Hushang Ansary.
Over the years residents and politicians have bemoaned the fact that nothing was done with Mullet Bay, but nobody ever took action; for private citizens it was probably too complicated and, based on results, politicians simply did not care – at least, not enough.
MP Emmanuel stood a bit apart from the rest in this committee meeting with his remark “Don’t insult the intelligence of members of parliament” – shortly after MP Richardson had declared: “I am very much worrisome.”
Jardim kept it professional and told committee-members what the law allows him to disclose, while he kept back information with a potential negative effect on policyholders.
MP Brison’s suggestion that he might ask for a parliamentary inquiry sounds like an interesting move, but I wonder very much what such an inquiry would achieve that goes beyond what the Central Bank currently is doing.
As Jardim wisely said, the interest of the policyholders is The Bank’s prime concern. What will or will not happen with Mullet Bay has to take a backseat to that interest, together with questions about people’s intelligence and remarks about their grammatical versatility.
