UNC moves against Lee Chin

VOWING to defend St Joseph MP Gerald Yetming to the hilt, UNC chairman Wade Mark said the party would not allow either Jamaican business tycoon Michael Lee Chin or Jamaican High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago, Lorne McDonough, to bully Yetming in any way.

During last Friday’s sitting of the Lower House, Yetming caused an uproar when he charged that a Government Minister was paid an undisclosed sum of money to facilitate a plan that would involve 20 percent of the First Citizens Bank (FCB) being sold to Lee Chin’s Canadian-based mutual funds company, AIC Limited. Yetming also charged that the controversial idea to merge FCB and the Unit Trust Corporation of TT did not originate within the mind of FCB chairman Ken Gordon but “was born in Jamaica”. Lee Chin, Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Leader of Government Business Ken Valley have all dismissed Yetming’s allegations with Lee Chin demanding that the UNC MP produce evidence to back up his claims. “We believe this assault by Mr Lee Chin is an assault on our parliamentary democracy and our entire parliamentary system,” Mark declared. The UNC chairman said Yetming’s statement last Friday was covered under the rules of parliamentary privilege and reported legal action taken against the St Joseph MP in Jamaica and Canada was “a waste of time”. Addressing the post-Cabinet news conference on Thursday at Whitehall, Prime Minister Manning hinted that Government could also be making a statement of its own on this matter.

Meanwhile the Central Bank on Friday declared that at no time did Governor Ewart Williams complain to his Jamaican counterpart “about his countrymen’s (Jamaicans) risky, get-rich-quick approach to success”. The bank said Yetming misquoted a July 8, 2003 speech made by Williams to ATTIC in which Williams quoted from a Caribbean Monetary Studies publication by Gladstone Bonnick entitled “Storm in a Tea Cup or Crisis in Jamaica’s Financial Sector”. The Bank said the true version of Williams’ speech reads: “In discussing some of the factors leading up to the financial crisis in Jamaica, the Chairman of FINSAC (the government agency charged with resolving the crisis) pointed to the country’s indigenous financial sector entrepeneurs whom he thought were (Williams’ quote): too eager to get rich; too bullish in risking other people’s money; too eager to start at the top; too competitive with one another in demonstrating the trappings of success, reflected in the rush to form larger and more complex groups and too prone to bend prudential norms and regulations”. The Bank criticised a daily newspaper (not Newsday) for misquoting Williams and said “it appreciates the publication of the correct version of what in fact transpired”.