Appearing alongside Mr. Stubbs as a guest on the Love 97 Programme “Jones and Company” which aired Sunday, Mr. Collie also said that there was an obvious breakdown in the entire government as evidenced by the debacle.
“It seems to me that the entire government either went to sleep or had their hands off the wheel,” he said.
Mr. Collie added, “The Ministry of Agriculture is implicated here. The Central Bank of The Bahamas exchange controls were circumvented, the Minister responsible for Immigration…boats came into the country and he never knew about it. The procedure for protocol in the BAIC shop also broke down.”
Mr. Stubbs said he was contemplating resignation from the corporation since day one.
“From the time the first press frenzy around the BAIC firings, I contemplated resigning,” he said.
Mr. Stubbs said that the prime minister never asked him to resign or threatened to fire him.
But, he said they did meet before he submitted his resignation and made the announcement in parliament.
“The prime minister and I had a meeting where [he] sought clarification on certain issues,” Mr. Stubbs said. “I was able to show him and tell him my side of the story because up until that time I did not have the opportunity to do so.”
Mr. Stubbs said that there are several Bahamian fishermen who have overseas or foreign mortgages.
“I further found having spoken to a lot of the companies in Florida myself… a lot of the fish processing plants in Florida all the way up to Tampa, Palm Beach and Tallahassee who finance Bahamian fishing boats- that when those mortgages were drawn up none of those Bahamians had Central Bank approvals,” he said.
Mr. Stubbs added, “Some of those Bahamians had first mortgages from the Bahamas Development Bank (BDB) The fishermen only got approval when it was time to pay those mortgages back.”
He said that in Grand Bahama there was one law firm, which specialized in doing those types of mortgages.
“There were huge groups of Bahamian businessmen who in the 70’s and the 80’s and right up to the 90’s went into deep sea commercial fishing and who had mortgages with a company called ATCO out of Florida,” Mr. Stubbs said.
“These Bahamians …some people put up land some didn’t put up anything. They used the boats they were funding as collateral, many of the boats were taken back, and this company now owns a lot of land in Grand Bahama… I’ve discovered that,” Mr. Stubbs said.
He also said, “What is interesting here is that a lot of these people who are making noise are themselves the holders of foreign mortgages without Central Bank approval.”
Mr. Collie said, however, that there seems to be a stamp of approval put on the deal and it appears that there is disregard for exchange control regulations when a bona fide department of the government [BAIC] is structuring the deal.
He said the close relationship of the chairman [Stubbs] and the owner of Netsiwill Holdings Limited [Earlin Williams] “leaves in the public domain, room for speculation and in retrospect there was some weight to what the speculation was.”
But Mr. Stubbs said he did not see a conflict of interest in his friend, Mr. Williams, being a consultant at BAIC, and heading a company involved in a deal the corporation was structuring.
He suggested that such an arrangement is not uncommon.
By Julian Reid, The Bahama Journal
