JAMAICA is beautiful, and we have some of the most wonderful people on the face of the Earth, but we are also a crazy country.

At times there is love in our hearts and in the next minute someone is looking for an excuse to commit an act of violence on somebody else. Apart from that, this country devalues justice; the very hallmark of what gives the people living in a country the reason to have faith in the local polity.

An estimate of the number of court cases pending in this country is about 400,000. In a nation of about three million one may form the conclusion that maybe, like America, our people are just the litigious type who want to sue every time someone eats a piece of jerk pork that, they say, gave them ‘running belly’.

That is patently not the case. In simple language the justice system in this country has been run over by an 18-wheeler, and many aspects of it have been totally shot to pieces. It is broken.

People seeking justice through the courts in Jamaica begin with some hope, but at some stage, five or 10 years down the road, when nothing more than the mention date of the case has been advanced, a few of our more desperate people in not seeing the government as their facilitators will decide that, maybe, a sharpened cutlass or, depending on the heft of the pocket, a personal hit job with the weapon of preference, the gun, may just be their way of extracting ‘justice’ from a crashed system.

In a most complex and complicated case, which was recently before the courts of our land, a matter was decided between, on one hand, Y P Seaton, and companies operated by him and, on the other hand, a bank operating in the 1990s. That bank was eventually absorbed by the intricacies involved in what became known as Finsac.

In one part of the court documents the court ruled that accounts which were held in a bank, which were frozen by the bank because of complexities happening between both parties, were entitled to be paid to Y P Seaton with interest based on the time involved. The amount including interest have now amounted to $4 billion.

In a part of the court’s interpretation of the socioeconomic period of the 1990s the following was stated in the judgement of RBTT Bank vs Y P Seaton et al, in paragraph 32 of the case in the Supreme Court Civil Division Claim no CL 1993/E083.

“The question of when compound interest should be applied is a matter of great concern, particularly to those citizens who have been caught up in the financial sector crisis of the 1990s. Some of them have been paying back the debt for years with no end in sight.

“The sum they borrowed increased horrendously by way of compound interest. Despite the cries from citizens, the issue has not been addressed in any comprehensive way. One of the possible long-term consequences of unbridled compound interest is that it stifles economic growth because it takes away the purchasing power from citizens thereby depressing consumer spending leading to economic stagnation with the only beneficiaries being financial institutions.

“Ultimately, it impoverishes the country and even financial institutions will be affected because there will come a time when they have fewer and fewer persons to lend which leads to either increased interest rates (to keep up returns) or loose lending policies to encourage borrowing, neither of which is any good.”

The real matter at hand in this case is quite complicated. It was argued in the latter parts of 2012, 2013 and in early 2014.

The court documents capture the mood perfectly. Paragraph one begins with:

“It was the year 1990. Jamaica was in the throes of an extreme shortage of foreign exchange. The Bank of Jamaica (‘BoJ’) had little or no foreign exchange. Those who needed foreign exchange in large quantities had to find those who had it and work out an exchange rate. Not even government companies could rely on the BoJ to provide them with needed foreign exchange to pay for goods and services from overseas.”

In a most complex matter the court ruled that the bank was wrong to extract from Y P Seaton’s personal account $15 million for matters involving trade issues between companies which had used the bank as their financial entity. At that time also, the bank had frozen a number of accounts belonging to Seaton, a Jamaican who had started out his operations in 1969 and grew it to the level of success it has become.

While Seaton and his companies have won the court cases in both matters, the bank has filed an appeal and the courts issued a stay of execution on the payment to Seaton of $4 billion pending the outcome of the appeal. In granting the stay of execution, the court held that the bank has a reasonably good and arguable case on appeal. The application brought by the bank for the stay of execution was supported by an affidavit supplied by the financial secretary of Jamaica.

It must be stated that because the bank was an entity which morphed from one bank to the other and then to the other in the heady days leading up to the financial meltdown in the mid-1990s the Government’s involvement has arrived by way of indemnity linked to the sale of the bank by Finsac. Hence, the Government of Jamaica being the ‘owner’ of what the court decreed.

The affidavit of the financial secretary begins with:

“If there is no stay of execution pending the hearing of this appeal and the Government is required to pay a sum in the region of $4 billion pursuant to that indemnity, there would be immediate, serious, negative fiscal consequences.

“An additional expenditure of $4 billion by the end of the fiscal year 2014/15 (that is, before March 2015) represents an unplanned expenditure in the amount of 0.25 per cent of GDP, and 1.3 per cent of currently budgeted Central Government non-debt expenditures for 2014/15.”

In other words, when the PNP Government of Jamaica in the 1990s formed Finsac after acquiring the financial institutions which had fallen down due to the own ‘mopping up of liquidity’ policies of the 1990s and runaway high interest rates, the PNP Government of 2015 is now saying, ‘Sorry, mi fool yuh!’

The Government is now saying to Seaton, the courts have ruled that you are entitled to what you claimed but even though we indemnified the banks when we acquired them, we will only take what we could get and not what has been ruled, we have to pay out. Such is the power of Government.

Had Seaton been a man not having the bad luck to be born in Jamaica and he was, say, an American or an Englishman, would the Government, via the bank, even dare consider staying the execution of this judgement and risk getting a bad name in the international community. Absolutely not!

Another part of the affidavit of Financial Secretary Devon Rowe states in paragraph 8: “Further, expenditure ceilings in any one fiscal year are part of a set of multi-year, integrated macroeconomic programme targets, so that unplanned adjustments in any one year, which displaces planned expenditure, would also have to be reflected in subsequent programme years.”

As brought out in the case, which the court documents states about 1990 as: “So short was foreign exchange that JCTC entered into agreements to purchase milk powder with an overseas company which accepted Jamaican dollars, thus relieving JCTC of the obligation to find foreign exchange to pay under the sale contract. Throughout, this case, no one has remotely suggested that BoJ had any foreign exchange to sell to anyone or to make available to government companies.”

For those without long memories, JCTC was the Jamaica Commodity Trading Company, which was a government-run entity under the ‘democratic socialist’ PNP government of the 1990s. It was set up to import basic goods like milk powder, rice, cornmeal, etc, and one of the saviours who supplied the entire efforts in sourcing foreign exchange for the milk powder purchases then was Y P Seaton, a patriotic Jamaican.

And for him daring to stick his neck out in operating in tandem with a company called Prolacto to supply the needed foreign exchange to ensure that JCTC could purchase milk powder so that poor families did not fall into starvation, he is now being asked to forget about all that and accept what the government says because it alone has all the power?

Where were the members of the political directorate in the 1990s when he was sticking out his neck to assist poor Jamaicans because he knew where he was coming from? Where were they when they took over the banks which were ruined by their own monetary policies?

Are they now so smug simply because they exercise power that they can say, “Thanks for helping. We screwed you over. Now back off!”

The court captures it perfectly when it says in Sykes J (1): “This is the final phase, in the Supreme Court, of litigation that arose out of events that took place in 1990, when the Most Honourable Michael Manley was prime minister of Jamaica, President George H W Bush was president of the United States of American (sic) and the Right Honourable Sir John Major was prime minister of the United Kingdom.”

The final phase, indeed, when a government can turn back on one of the real sons of the Jamaican soil and say, “we don’t have to pay you because you are one and the people are many. We have the people on our sides. We know you helped the people, but they don’t know that. Back off, for now”.

That is the Government in Jamaica. Never to be trusted!

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