Government shows
bad faith, says Sarah
~ Technocrats advise bilateral negotiations between Dutch and St. Maarten ~
PHILIPSBURG--Central Government advisors on Constitutional Affairs have advised their St. Maarten counterparts that the island should continue pursuing its country status within the Dutch Kingdom via bilateral talks with the Dutch Government.
In an e-mail send last week, the advisers indicated that the Central Government had concluded St. Maarten would not continue in the constitutional process as long as the issue of financial supervision and corporate governance was not satisfactorily dealt with.
According to them, the Central Government had therefore decided to move ahead and they advised St. Maarten to resolve its remaining differences with the Dutch in bilateral talks on the issue.
The correspondence has prompted Constitutional Affairs Commissioner Sarah Wescot-Williams to draft a letter to Prime Minister Emily de Jongh-Elhage seeking clarification on the matter.
“I expressed two things to the Prime Minister. We believe it was a show of bad faith for the politicians involved not to have communicated from government to government, and second, the information on the basis of which this e-mail was communicated is wrong information and the records are there to show it,” Wescot-Williams stated during the Executive Council press briefing on Wednesday.
She said in her letter that she rejected the blame being placed on St. Maarten for stalling the process.
She explained that the e-mail had sparked a reaction from the local advisors, who had sent back an e-mail asking if the e-mail of the Central Government advisors was an official communication to St. Maarten, if no more political discussion would take place and it would be decided in May, during the scheduled political consultation, that St. Maarten should continue its discussions with the Netherlands on its own.
Wescot-Williams said that because St. Maarten had not received any answer, she had decided to write De Jongh-Elhage a letter.
She once again explained St. Maarten’s position on the CFT and corporate governance. She said that during the discussion about the formulation of the text for the Kingdom Resolution containing the General Enactment AMvR a small but significant new portion had been injected into the discussions from “left field.”
This was that when islands had completed their package of rules regulating corporate governance and it had been vetted by technocrats based on international standards and norms, the Dutch technocrats wanted also that the financial supervisor would have to determine that there was an agreement with the Dutch Government and the entity on the regulations for corporate governance.
However, this was never an agreement, the Commissioner said. “The issue is that too often we see that we reach an agreement on a matter and when it comes down to the technicians working out and formulating the agreement in a resolution or a law then other things are inserted in the particular document.”
For her, the question is what happens if, for whatever reason, the Dutch Government says it has a problem with the package of regulations and the discussion goes back and forward till August. “Then St. Maarten is told, ‘You don’t have things in place and have not complied with the arrangements, so we have to go to the next step.’”
The Commissioner said she had highlighted the entire agreement of January 22 in her letter to the Prime Minister. She asked De Jongh-Elhage for her or any other Kingdom partner to tell or show St. Maarten that as part of the agreement of January 22 it had been agreed that after all of the procedure had been followed and after vetting by the Dutch technocrats, the islands still needed approval from the Dutch Government for their corporate governance regulations.
The whole package of corporate governance regulations was discussed in the Central Committee of the Island Council last Monday. Questions were asked and the Executive Council will be answering the questions for the process to continue, Wescot-Williams said.
