Mark Golding

The Opposition People's National Party has closed ranks behind the embattled former finance minister, Dr Omar Davies.

The minister, who is also opposition spokesman on finance, has been under pressure since Tuesday when Prime Minister Bruce Golding disclosed the terms of the contract of former governor of the Bank of Jamaica, Derick Latibeaudiere.

In addition, the Opposition has lashed the Government for the timing of the dismissal of the governor which triggered a downgrade by international rating agency, Standard and Poor's.

Davies has denied any wrongdoing in the awarding of the contract but that has not stopped public criticisms.

open-ended contract

Bunting

These have been loudest since the prime minister's claim that the former finance minister should be personally blamed for the contract, which would have resulted in Latibeaudiere's compensation package moving from $22,996,500 at the end of October to $38,363,360 on November 1.

"The former governor is not to be blamed for the absurdly generous and open-ended contractual terms that he enjoyed. He was the beneficiary. That blame must be laid squarely at the feet of the former Government and the former minister of finance, in particular, who authorised and signed the contract," Golding declared in Parliament on Tuesday.

But on Wednesday, the PNP charged that the prime minister's claims about Latibeaudiere's salary were nothing but a sideshow designed to mask the long-arranged plan to sack the former governor.

"This was really a pretext for getting rid of the governor because the evidence suggests that there was a plan to do so well before this matter ever came to the prime minister's attention," Mark Golding, the opposition spokesman on industry and commerce claimed during a media briefing.

Mark Golding, an opposition senator, was the party's lead man at Wednesday's media briefing in the absence of Davies, who was reportedly overseas, and PNP President Portia Simpson Miller.

"I'm satisfied that he (Davies) did nothing wrong and I'm satisfied that if he had been in (finance minister Audley) Shaw's shoes he would have approached the matter differently, and I think we would have had a negotiated solution," Senator Golding said, as he noted that Latibeaudiere had not received a dollar of the increased salary pointed to by the prime minister in Parliament.

money not the issue

According to Mark Golding, the rent and maintenance clauses in the former governor's contract, which were the main areas of concern for the government, were not unusual and only became a problem because of the level of inflation since 2008.

Senator Golding argued that no real effort was made by the administration to renegotiate the clauses of the contract because the administration had already decided that it could not work with Latibeaudiere.

That position was supported by Peter Bunting, the PNP general secretary, who argued that if the issue was money, there was no way the Government would fire the central bank governor when it would have to come up with more than his salary to pay him off.

Bunting was reluctant to estimate the former governor's compensation package, but agreed that it would be "several million dollars".

According to Bunting, the reaction from S&P, which was not unexpected, will hit the country hard.

"If the downgrade increases our cost of borrowing by, say, one per cent for only one year, we are talking about $12 billion that this incompetent handling, that this dismissal, will cost the country," Bunting said.

arthur.hall@gleanerjm.com