All the information gathered by the Finsac Commission during its examination of the circumstances that led to the collapse of financial institutions in the 1990s is to be published on a specially curated website and made available to the public in perpetuity, Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke announced in Parliament on Tuesday.

Additionally, the finance ministry is to provide grants for academic research to be published, as well as the creation of documentaries on the financial sector collapse “from which future generations can learn”, Clarke told the House of Representatives as he opened the 2014/25 budget debate.

Clarke did not give a date for the publication of the Finsac Commission archives; however, he said that the perspectives on what he termed “a defining period of the Jamaican story” need to be made available to the public as soon as is practicably possible.

“We owe it to the victims of that era, to ourselves, and to future generations, to do our best to record for posterity the evidence gathered from the commission, make it publicly available, and have it inspire the production of research reports and cultural creative output,” Dr Clarke said.

Finsac (Financial Sector Adjustment Company) Limited was established by the Government in January 1997 to restore stability after the collapse of several major financial institutions due largely to various factors, including high bank interest rates promulgated by the then Government, excessive spending by large, small and medium-sized businesses, and a meteoric rise in bad loans at financial institutions.

It is still unclear how much the economy lost during the period; however, experts have put it at approximately $120 billion and about 40 per cent of GDP.

In his presentation on Tuesday, Clarke said that by comparison the global financial crisis of 2009, in which banks collapsed, cost the United States nine per cent of GDP.

“Our financial sector crisis was five times worse than the impact of the worst global financial crisis in 100 years in the United States,” said Clarke.

He pointed to the impact that the financial sector meltdown had on businesses, as well as its adverse social effect as many Jamaicans lost their homes, livelihoods “and some lost their lives”.

Clarke outlined the history of the Finsac Commission, from its establishment on January 12, 2009, to its cessation in 2012, its reactivation in June 2016, and up to the point in 2019 when the commissioners, due to the absence of further funding, resigned and turned over the drafts of chapters of a report, along with thousands of pages of transcripts of evidence and submissions placed before the commission, all in electronic form.

He said that when he became minister of finance and the public service in March 2018, there was still no report from commission, “and given the multiple upward revisions in the estimated cost of producing the report, Cabinet lost confidence in the ability of the commission to actually produce the report within any meaningful time frame and within any reasonable cost”.

“The material gathered by the commission consists of contributions from then government officials, economists, academics, former leaders of failed financial institutions, customers of those institutions including those who found themselves with ballooning debts, among many other stakeholders,” Clarke said.

He also argued that the financial crisis “plunged Jamaica into deeper macro instability and resulted in a rapid build-up in our debt ratio that has taken us 30 years to reduce. It had the effect of obliterating opportunity as for decades interest costs consumed national resources”.

Clarke said on publication of the archives the finance ministry will issue a special call “for scholarly research for the purposes of producing scholarly articles, books and other publications on any or all of the context, causes, consequences and lessons of the financial sector crisis as well as an assessment of the response”.

The call, he said, will be supported by research grants awarded to research teams which, in aggregate, will not exceed $40 million, across multiple research grants.

“These grants will be structured such that a majority of the funds are paid on submission of the final article, book, or scholarly publications,” Clarke explained.

A similar call, supported by grants, will be issued, in collaboration with the culture ministry, to the creative community for proposals for documentaries and a theatrical production on the financial sector collapse, its causes and effects, produced from the Finsac Commission archives.