The Tribune

By KHRISNA VIRGIL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kvirgil@tribunemedia.net

FNM Chairman Michael Pintard yesterday called on Prime Minister Perry Christie to reveal publicly whose interest the FNM is reportedly working on behalf of with its continued chiding of the government regarding the handling and operations of the Bank of the Bahamas.

Mr Pintard denied any vested interests on the part of the FNM in the Bank of the Bahamas (BOB) as was several times suggested by Mr Christie.

He said the suggestion that the FNM had ulterior motives in the BOB issue was a red herring. He told The Tribune that Mr Christie was attempting to distract Bahamians from the government’s lack of transparency on matters related to BOB.

The prime minister’s latest statement in this regard came last Wednesday as he gave a spirited intervention in the House of Assembly in defence of outgoing BOB Managing Director Paul McWeeney.

“We in the Free National Movement know that what Mr Christie suggests is (not true),” Mr Pintard said.

“The FNM is deeply concerned about employees and protecting the value of shares when it comes to BOB. Regarding the spectre that there is an unknown entity that the FNM is working for because we continuously sound the alarm on their handling of the bank is in my estimation an attempt on Mr Christie’s part to distract Bahamians. There is no such entity.

“So we in the FNM are urging the prime minister and the government to do the public a favour. Do the public a favour and reveal who that entity is.”

In the House of Assembly, Mr Christie questioned if the FNM had a hidden agenda to weaken the bank. He described people working for BOB’s demise as “vultures”.

At the time he said: “Mr Speaker, I ask the question, if there isn’t a hidden agenda somewhere to weaken the Bank of the Bahamas, that those who I describe as vultures can come swooping down to gobble it up?

“I can tell you this, Mr Speaker, as I stand here I want to be able to say the vultures will never succeed, not while this government is in power.”

Prior to this, Mr Christie vigorously defended Mr McWeeney. He told parliamentarians that apart from having experience to run the bank, Mr McWeeney had set several precedents in the banking sector after he took over BOB’s helm.

He said several areas of BOB had grown impressively under Mr McWeeney’s watch.

Yesterday Mr Pintard said Mr McWeeney should be commended for his contribution. However, he said, the problem is there was not enough transparency during his tenure as BOB’s managing director.

“The concern really isn’t the managing director alone. He is but one of the variables in the decision making process,” the senator said.

“Notwithstanding his previous outstanding performance, we happen to only know about the accumulation of $100m which is a remarkable amount of debt. This is the amount that the government placed in Resolve. We have no indication of anything else.

“The prime minister said the bank was subject to the 2008 global recession and that it did not really hit hard times until about two years ago, but he needs to clarify that only during the period of the recession that this amount of (bad) loans would have accumulated. One way to make the case is to indicate by how much (those bad loans) predated the recession,” Mr Pintard said.