THE RECENT letter from Mr. Donald Lindo, a former vice-president of the Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society, and other letters to the Editor will, we hope, rekindle an interest in finding out the causal factors, which led to the collapse in the financial sector in the 1990s.
Any society which has an interest in scholarship, research and analysis cannot afford to have such an epochal event defined by unsubstantiated allegations of "who tief", and equally unsubstantiated anecdotal references of whose loan was written off.
We need to know what went wrong, what contributed to the collapse of the indigenous financial sector and how, if there is blame, it is to be apportioned. We need to know why a group of local entrepreneurs, many of whom had bought out overseas companies operating in Jamaica, others who had created institutions, would seem to have been suddenly afflicted with a malady which caused them to squander all that they had built up carefully over many years.
In the case of the Jamaica Mutual, the company had been in existence for over 150 years and had been able over the course of these years to survive many cataclysmic man-made and natural disasters. Did it flounder, as the letter writer implies, because of inadequate supervision on the part of the Office of the Superintendent of Insurance when things began to get out of hand? Or were there more systemic reasons that resulted in a company, which had been once rich enough to reportedly bail out Governments with cash flow problems, to go under.
In some societies, including doctrinaire capitalist ones, there are institutions that are so much the embodiment of their heritage and their capacities as a people that they cannot be allowed to fail.
Jamaica Mutual had as one of its founders George William Gordon who has been accorded the status of National Hero and who with other men of his time founded, without capital, a mutual company that grew to become the leading life insurance company in the region.
Some years ago there was an attempt in the Senate, with bipartisan support, to have an inquiry into the collapse of the financial sector. The effort came to nothing because the Central Bank claimed that the secrecy of the Banking Act prevented their officers from testifying before such an inquiry.
We would urge the Government to take the lead in finding the ways and means, in the interest of posterity, to make possible an inquiry into the collapse of the financial sector. We would not want similar errors to be committed again.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
