PRIME Minister Portia Simpson Miller has received a report on the conflict between junior agriculture minister Errol Ennis, and the government’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) on Olint, but is still mum on the issue.

Minister of Information Donald Buchanan told Monday’s post-Cabinet press briefing that a report has been made to the prime minister on the issue, but that it has not come back to the Cabinet for discussion.

“I know that Minister (Robert) Pickersgill has reported to Prime Minister Simpson Miller on this matter. I don’t know what is the nature of that report. It is not something that has come up at Cabinet,” Buchanan told the briefing at Jamaica House.

He said, however, that he did not know when the report was made. “I just know that the minister who was so advised has indicated that he has had discussions and has spoken with the prime minister with respect to those discussions,” he said.

Buchanan, at a post-Cabinet press briefing on January 29, reported then that a small team had been appointed by the prime minister to discuss with Minister Ennis his remarks and what his present position was with respect to those remarks. Ennis, in a letter to the Observer the previous week, described a raid by the financial investigations arm of 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”.

But, Minister of Finance and Planning Omar Davies told Parliament a week later that he supported the FSC.

Davies, in response to questions raised by opposition spokesman on finance and the public service, Audley Shaw, said that the free market could not be interpreted as meaning “that any man can just go out there and promise anything to anybody and he should be free to so do”.

“There are rules, if you claim to be investing these monies. The FSC, or the central bank for depositing institutions, have the legal obligation to say, ‘tell me what you are doing? Who are you seeking to attract?’ You can’t just have people going around saying, I am forming a club, and the club is ever increasing. You are now publicly selling services,” Dr Davies said then.