VETERAN trade unionist and president of the Union of Clerical, Administrative and Supervisory Employees (UCASE) Vincent Morrison has spurned Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke’s pledge to publish the archives of the information gathered by the Financial Sector Adjustment Company (Finsac) Commission during its examination of the circumstances that led to the folding of financial houses in the 1990s.

Making the announcement during his opening presentation of the 2024-2025 Budget Debate in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Clarke said, “We will publish as soon as practically possible on a specially curated website the Finsac Commission archives consisting of all of the evidence provided and the submissions made to the commission.”

Additionally, he said 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, who did not give a date for the publication of the Finsac Commission archives, however, 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.

But Morrison, speaking with the Jamaica Observer following the announcement said, “I want to see the full Finsac report published, not just the archives. You can’t spend $179 million on a report and you are hearing that the archives alone [will be made public].”

“What is the Government hiding there? I suspect if it was something embarrassing or detrimental to the Opposition they would publish it long time, but Jamaica needs to know the situation,” said Morrison.

Calling for “Jamaica to be told the truth”, he said, “Finsac is what saved the economic life of this country. Finsac did not create the problem.”

“Finsac was a creative tool used by the then PJ Patterson-led Government to save the economy of Jamaica, and we must be told what really caused it, it cannot be just the issue of high interest rates alone. I have said this repeatedly, and there are many people who feel that some of the businesses that Jamaica lost, that perhaps were divested to other entities, perhaps could have gone back to Jamaicans,” he noted.

“When you talk about the $140-odd billion that was pulled out of the Jamaican economy to save the financial sector, you have to say the right decision was taken to sell those businesses to the highest bidder or to those people who could prevent a reoccurrence of what happened prior to Finsac. But Finsac was created by the Government to not only cauterise but to clean up the mess,” he said.

Finsac 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 gross domestic product (GDP).

The Finsac Commission of Enquiry began in 2009 but was terminated in 2012 before being reactivated in June 2016. In 2019, 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. The commission was tasked with examining the circumstances that led to the collapse of the country’s financial institutions in the 1990s. 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.