So, there will not be an official report on the commission of enquiry established to review the purpose and work of the Financial Sector Adjustment Company (Finsac), after all. Still, $218.3 million of taxpayers’ resources, spent between March 2008 and March 2019, has turned out to be a glorified photocopying exercise, devoid of the lofty ideals adumbrated by then Finance Minister Audley Shaw, in announcing an enquiry into the collapse of the financial sector in March 2008.

According to Minister Shaw, the purpose of the commission of enquiry was “to learn from the mistakes made during the run-up the crash. Outside of the financial audit, we need a more comprehensive commission that can go into the details of it, the antecedents”.

Sixteen years later, we learn from his successor, in his dying days as minister of finance, that “Jamaicans will have access to the Finsac Commission Archives covering more than the decade-old enquiry into the collapse of the domestic financial sector in the 1990s”. That was not the deal.

And since the Government decided to give access, why not access to all documents, including important forensic audits done as part of the discovery process?

The collection of submissions, memoranda, regulators’ excuses, personal testimonies, and sundry papers are all that Jamaicans will have or, better, all that the commissioners could do for the handsome fees paid to them for incomplete work, since they produced no report.

No findings, no conclusions, no recommendations, and Jamaicans are, therefore, left to speculate, conjecture or otherwise put their own spin on a wildly emotional topic.

Journalists from all sides of the spectrum and bloggers, financially literate or not, will be the main protagonists as we head into an orgy of pre-election spin and propaganda.

This is a great disservice to those who expected more. Truth will become the first casualty, without rigour and empirical data to support one side or the other. The entire debate is, therefore, poised to become political instead of economic and policy-oriented.

The great William Shakespeare once remarked in his epic, Julius Caesar: “O judgement, thou are fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason.” Good judgement deserted whomever was the architect of this great act of political grandstanding and political deception. Jamaica expected the full story, nothing less.

The so-called Finsac Commission was first appointed as a three-man commission of late retired justice of the Supreme Court Boyd Carey; chartered accountant Worrick Bogle; and Charles Ross, an investment manager. Former Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) Deputy Governor Fernando DePeralto was secretary.

Carey, who was soon found to be in a conflict of interest, was replaced by Bogle, not an unknown partisan.

Ross is a founding director of Sterling Asset Management.

Although having a rocky start, Minister Shaw sent them on their way with an exhortation that the inquiry “be conducted to properly comprehend the situation in moving forward”.

He followed, on May 6, 2009, with a promise to table a report in Parliament, within weeks, of a comprehensive report on the probe into the sale of Finsac.

Finsac was registered in January 1997 with a mandate to restore stability to Jamaica’s financial institutions. Its first chairman was Dr Gladstone Bonnick, a former deputy governor of BOJ, former head of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), and a World Bank expert in economics. Other members included late Solicitor General Dr Ken Rattray; former Financial Secretary Shirley Tindall; Wilberne Persaud, lecturer in economics at The University of the West Indies; Robert Wan of the Bankers Association; trade unionist Las Perry; and former Finance Minister David Coore, QC.

That was no ordinary team set up to spearhead the recovery that had cost an estimated 40 per cent of Jamaica’s gross domestic product (GDP), despite the six per cent projection by the Bank of Jamaica.

This commission’s report was, therefore, a big thing because it had a serious mandate. Jamaica and the international financial and economic community were expecting more, not purely because of the cost and the political hype, but because it was billed as an exercise to ensure it never, ever happened again.

The country was aware of many factors prevailing in the economy at the time — high interest rates, weak financial regulatory mechanisms and institutions, international trade liberalisation, foreign exchange deregulation, among others. What were the options? Is it true that the best correction would have been to reverse the liberalised foreign exchange policy regime? Is the country now to be left purely to speculation or political mischief that, “It’s Omar [Davies’] fault,” even though the meltdown itself predated his incumbency? How does that help?

What is also disheartening is that many people had genuinely high expectations and took the time to prepare and participate, including Dr Davies, Shirley Tyndall, and other officials, despite misgivings.

I don’t need to be Dr Davies’ advocate, neither do I speak for former Prime Minister P J Patterson, but I can still hear him asking the question: When Jamaicans lose all their savings in banks and other financial institutions, who will explain it to an angry population of almost three million people, some still in the cane fields with their machetes?

The Finsac enquiry survived three administrations — Bruce Golding, Portia Simpson Miller, and Andrew Holness — perhaps because all thought it important. To the People’s National Party’s eternal credit, it did not end it in 2012-16, but provided budgetary support, regardless of what could be the outcome.

In his final budget presentation as minister of finance, on March 8, 2018, Audley Shaw announced that the report would be sent to the governor general shortly. What has become of that pledge to Parliament?

To have journeyed all the way from 2008 to this unhappy end is a blot on Nigel Clarke’s stewardship. Whoever put him up to it, as I doubt it’s in his DNA, will only continue the tribal nature of our political discourse and ignorance of the full causes and effects. And, in that, I submit, the last stage is likely to be worse than the first.

Colin Campbell is a former minister of information in a People National Party Administration.