The Daily Nation of January 20 featured an interview with Mr John Beale, the former president and chief executive officer of RBTT Bank (Barbados) and Barbados’ current Ambassador in Washington DC, in which he described the process through which banks in Barbados impose bank fees and other charges on their Barbadian customers.
Mr Beale’s reported words were as follows: “For example, every year a bank would sit down with their directors and their managers and they may say, ‘We made $1 million last year, we must make
$1.1 million this year. Where is it coming from?’ The guy may say the loans are not as many as we had in the past, and then somebody comes up with the bright idea, ‘Let’s make some extra fees’. They go straight to [the] bottom line; there is no cost to it. Someone may ask, ‘How can we do that?’ The answer would be, ‘Let’s tack on a $5 fee here or something and across the board that would give us another $200 000’.”
This is capitalism at its very worst. This is a business system based on the principle of plundering the enterprise and its customers or constituents for the sole purpose of delivering ever increasing “profits” to people whose only connection to the enterprise is that they hold pieces of paper (shares) that entitle them to be considered a part owner of the enterprise.
Now, if Barbados had a properly functioning democratic parliamentary system, Mr Beale’s statement would have elicited howls of outrage from our Members of Parliament, and the setting up of a parliamentary committee to investigate the banks, and to develop appropriate measures to protect the Barbadian public.
Needless to say, there will be no such response from the ineffectual “political eunuchs” of the two political parties that are popularly known as “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Bum”.
The Peoples Empowerment Party, on the other hand, publicly addressed this issue last year as a component of the PEP’s programme to tackle the recession. The exact quote from our party document entitled Time To Make A Move! is as follows: “One of our strategies must be to save our people from the suffocating effect of burdensome debt and oppressively high interest rates.
“At the present time, many thousands of working class and middle class Barbadians find themselves in a debt trap – ensnared by high and oppressive levels of bank debt, mortgage debt, automobile based finance company debt, and credit card debt. Generally speaking, the interest charged on credit in Barbados is way too high . . .
“It is clear therefore that our Government needs to come to the rescue of the Barbadian people by ensuring that the Minister of Finance, a public official elected by the people and therefore accountable to the people, has the power to intervene and to determine maximum limits on interest rates charged by banks and other financial institutions, across the board.
“There is also scope for the Minister of Finance and/or the Central Bank of Barbados to engage with the banking sector in working out a national Code of Conduct that will guide the behaviour and actions of banks in relation to their imposition of interest and other user charges on Barbadians during this period of national response to the intensifying recession.”
• The PEP column represents the views of the People’s Empowerment Party. Email [email protected].
