The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

FREE National Movement (FNM) chairman Darron Cash yesterday dismissed Labour Minister Shane Gibson’s assertion that the US State Department’s controversial 2014 investment report was authored by an FNM supporter as an attempt to deflect attention from his government’s embarrassing performance.

“The idea that the Free National Movement had anything whatsoever to do with the US State Department’s recent investment climate statement is a figment of Shane Gibson’s very fertile imagination,” Mr Cash said. “The accusation is completely false. The embattled minister is making a feeble yet obvious attempt to deflect attention from the fact that his government has been caught either with their hands in the cookie jar or in US investor’s pockets. They are now exposed and embarrassed and desperately finding any way to divert attention from their failure.”

Mr Gibson claimed on Thursdsay that Hank Ferguson, commercial specialist in economics in the commercial section of the US Embassy in Nassau, wrote the controversial report. Mr Ferguson, son of former FNM chairman Johnley Ferguson, is cited as the “contact point at post for public inquiries” on the report.

The report largely praised investment conditions in the Bahamas but noted an alleged lack of transparency in the government’s contract and procurement process, the PLP’s failure to fulfil many of its campaign promises and described the government’s efforts to implement economic and fiscal reform as “sluggish”.

Hitting back at PLP officials who have dismissed the report, Mr Cash said:  “This ‘shoot the messenger’ approach is very typical of the PLP government. They never accept responsibility for anything and must always find someone else to blame. When it is not former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham and the FNM they are blaming the American government. The FNM does not need the US Embassy to speak for us but we are gratified that the Embassy has also made it clear that the FNM had nothing to do with providing information for their report.”

Mr Cash said the Christie administration should spend its time addressing the “systematic corruption the US complains about” rather than seeking to diminish the significance of the US government’s report.

He said: “When the FNM came to office for the first time in 1992, the Bahamas was already tarnished as ‘a nation for sale’ and ‘Paradise Lost’. It took the FNM to clean up the damage they did to the country. We did not need the US to assist in spreading the word about the then corrupt PLP government. International investors who had been consistently having their pockets picked were doing that all by themselves.

“Now that Prime Minister Christie’s government has returned to those bad old days of scaring investors away with concerns about corruption, all the PLP Ministers need to do to identify the real culprits is look in the mirror.”