Central Bank governor Julian Francis compared International Business Companies (IBC’s), which flourished before the country’s blacklisting, to the drug trade. “There was a lot of easy money flowing,” he said.
Mr. Francis said it was esssential to weed out the IBC’s to avoid a “full force hit” by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
“We had gotten to a point where there was a lot of easy money flowing. In a way it’s like the drug problem we had here 10, 15 years ago when we had a lot of money flowing. Nobody questioned that, but everyone knew it was money we did not want,” he said.
Mr. Francis was a guest on the Sunday radio programme, Jones and Company. Asked by host Wendall Jones if it would be fair to say that the public criticised the 11 pieces of legislation passed by the former FNM administration as a knee-jerk reaction to get the country’s name off the FATF blacklist, resulting in a loss of a sector that provided substantial money to the Bahamian economy.
“They (the critics) are certainly wrong,” Mr. Francis said.
“Some people are misled by the things some people say about this and they are not told the truth. First, if that is true of the Bahamas it is true of most countries around the world who are involved in financial services because they have practically all had the same experiences we have had and that is a fact.”
Source: Felicity Ingraham, The Tribune
