News
'Disclose IMF terms'
Opposition says country should know proposals before agreement signed
BY MARK CUMMINGS , Observer senior reporter cummingsm@jamaicaobserver.com
Monday, June 29, 2009
PETERSFIELD, Westmoreland - The Opposition People's National Party (PNP) yesterday called on the government to disclose the proposed conditionalities under which the borrowing agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was being negotiated, before the arrangement is concluded.
"My concern is that the government says they are going back to the IMF but they have not indicated to the country, as yet, the improved conditions under which they say the IMF is lending," Opposition Leader Portia Simpson told the Observer, shortly after a meeting of the party's National Executive Council (NEC) at the Touch of Class Hotel in Central Westmoreland.
"I would like to know the conditionalities that they would impose now, to see whether or not they are as harsh as what they (IMF) imposed on Jamaica when we borrowed from them, years ago," said Simpson Miller.
She said that while the Opposition was not opposed to the country resuming a borrowing relationship with the IMF, the party's support for such a move would depend on the terms of the agreement.
Prime Minister Bruce Golding, speaking at the Production and Marketing Organisation conference and exposition in Trelawny last week, said that the country would know next month whether or not the government would enter into an arrangement with the Fund.
Finance Minister Audley Shaw is scheduled to leave the island for Washington this week with a high-level team to have talks with the Fund, while an IMF team is scheduled to hold talks with Jamaican officials in July.
Golding said his administration would not return to the IMF, if it was not satisfied that a borrowing relationship would be beneficial to the country.
However, Golding, who met last week with the Opposition, private sector and trade unions, has not disclosed the terms under which Jamaica was prepared to resume borrowing from the IMF which, during the 1970s and '80s, was severely criticised for the austerity measures it imposed on the country.
Jamaica ended its borrowing relationship with the IMF in the early-1990s.
Meanwhile, PNP chairman Robert Pickersgill told reporters, shortly after yesterday's meeting, that an agreement is yet to be reached with the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) regarding the holding of further by-elections in the dual citizenship fallout.
" The (PNP) general secretary (Peter Bunting) and myself and the JLP's deputy chairman(Rudyard Spencer) and secretary (Karl Samuda) met and we all agree that we will report to our respective party leaders, and so you will hear more on that when an agreement is reached," Pickersgill said.
When pressed, the PNP general secretary said both parties have agreed that they would not "at this time" divulge the outcome of the deliberations to the media.
Both parties have been meeting in recent weeks, in an effort to arrive at an agreement whereby there would be no contest for sitting members of parliament who breached the constitution by holding dual citizenship at the time of their nomination for the September 2007 general elections.
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