PRIME Minister Portia Simpson Miller has appointed a team to review junior minister Errol Ennis’s recent criticism of the Financial Services Commission (FSC) raid on Olint Corporation as being “gestapo-like”, according to Information Minister Donald Buchanan.

“A small team has been appointed by the prime minister to discuss with Minister Ennis his remarks and what his present position is with respect to those remarks,” Buchanan told yesterday’s post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House.

Buchanan was responding to questions following his statement to the briefing that Ennis’s remarks were discussed at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, and a position taken supporting the FSC and its operations and denouncing the criticisms.

“The Cabinet’s confidence in the Financial Services Commission remains firm,” Buchanan said. “The Cabinet disassociates itself from Minister Ennis’s pronouncements and we once again reaffirm our confidence in the FSC,” he added.

He said that after Finance Minister Omar Davies passes on the Cabinet’s response to the FSC later this week, the commission would make a public statement in reaction to Ennis’s criticisms.

Ennis, in a letter to the Observer last week, described a raid by the Financial Investigations Division, the financial policing arm of the Ministry of Finance and the FSC, on the offices of foreign exchange trader and investment club, Olint, as “Gestapo-like, a vulgar abuse of state power and highly reflective of the actions of a totalitarian state”.

He said that the raid was designed to destroy the foreign exchange trading and investment club which, he suggested, should, instead, be encouraged, “as a possible boon to the Jamaican economy”.

Ennis’s letter came a few days after Dr Davies warned people who put money in alternative investment schemes that they were doing so without the protection of the state.