BLP legacy: small businesses starting, continuing or expanding operations got assistance in preparing business plans, designing and packaging products, designing labels, quality controls, marketing, management and accounting, and launched an Innovation Fund providing funding and technical assistance to small and emerging innovative enterprises with business ideas or products with a potential for high returns.
Even with the militancy of Barbados Investors & Policyholders Alliance Inc., Barbadian victims of the scandalous collapse of CLICO International Life Insurance Limited (CIL)?have been puzzled, remarkably patient and long-suffering over why they would have had to endure such heavy burdens at the hands of the company’s top management and the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Government over the past three years.
Now they have started to understand through the startling disclosures in the forensic audit into CIL and its sordid financial relationship with parent company CLICO Holdings Barbados Limited and other parts of the once high-flying local empire.
Particularly where their eyes have been partially opened to the nature of the now highly questionable relationship between Leroy Parris, head of CLICO here, and the law firm of the late Prime Minister and Minister of Finance David Thompson.
Not only the thousands of financially deprived policyholders and depositors and their families but a disturbed public has since the shocking disclosures of the audit been anxiously waiting on the DLP for words of assurance on this national disaster.
Not forgetting the uselessness of previous votes of confidence from Thompson and other high-ranking Dems about the financial and management soundness of CLICO and promises that losers would be repaid.
At the time of writing, nothing at all on the current predicament of the CLICO sufferers had been heard from Prime Minister Freundel Stuart or Minister of Finance Chris “Unclear” Sinckler. Instead, victims and the public have had to rely on the words of House of Assembly Speaker Michael Carrington to get an idea of DLP thinking, which can only be described as indifferent and insensitive to the plight of people being financially, physically and psychologically impoverished as the party tries to brush off responsibility for the problem it created.
Seeing that Stuart, who spoke after Carrington at the same meeting, did not contradict him, we can only conclude that Carrington accurately reflected the smug but inhumane attitude of the DLP.
But come Sunday at Haggatt Hall, St Michael, the BLP team headed by Opposition Leader Owen Arthur will be giving details of the implications for Barbados’ future of the reckless, lawless and politically and financially incestuous bond between the DLP and CLICO that saw a DLP virtually devoid of humanity cruelly put being pals apparently above everything else.
The BLP will fight to ensure that the DLP keeps its multiple promises to all wronged by CLICO. The BLP will not settle for less than justice to those deserving it.
Still there are far more questions to be answered over who else in the DLP CLICO had such intimate contact with, and as happened with the “Eager 11”, will we be hearing a series of “not me” as survival is sought by a party disgraced by its own misdeeds.