Sigh .. another $30 million added to the government debt. When will it end? This is nothing but vote buying.

Comrade Banker to your knowledge has there ever been a police or any other investigation into what lead to the CLICO leaving so many financially stranded for many millions? If not, why not? Is there NO accountable for the very people who manged this mess? At minimum they should all be sued to repay any and all bonus monies, include lavish trips they were 'wrongly" advanced or paid for nothing more than bankrupting many thousands policy holders? Is there never accountability for any wrongs done to people in this Bahamaland? You go steal a O'Henry chocolate bar and they sends your ass on da recklessly driven Fox Hill Prison bus. You go figure.

more of the same voodoo economics. This is not a bailout for the policyholders, it is a bailout for Clico. Feeding the monster of entitlement that is all so Omni present in the Bahamian minds.

The resurrection of Southern Alliance Insurance?

Here again, as was the case for the Bank of The Bahamas (BOB), we see Christie screwing hard working Bahamian taxpayers by wrongfully using the public purse to bail out private personal investments made by many of his political friends and business cronies, like Allyson Maynard-Gibson and her family members and their investment holding companies, who have invested many millions of dollars in annuity products issued by CLICO (Bahamas). Christie's lamed brain rational for this bail out at the expense of Bahamian taxpayers is that government regulators with oversight responsibility for monitoring and regulating the business affairs of CLICO (Bahamas), like the previous Registrar of Insurers (Dr. Brown) and the previous Governor of the Central Bank of The Bahamas (James Smith), failed in their primary duty to ensure the interests of the annuity holders and other policyholders were protected by assets of CLICO (Bahamas) that should have been held (kept) in the Bahamas and not allowed to be removed from our country. Why should Bahamian taxpayers be made to pay for the past mistakes and outright negligence of Dr. Brown and James Smith who now both enjoy receiving generous monthly pension payments from the public purse. To add real insult to injury, Christie had the audacity to appoint James Smith as the Chairman of Bahamas Resolve where he is now being handsomely compensated by Bahamian taxpayers to keep a lid on the names of the 13 borrowers who defaulted on their loans received from BOB totalling $100 million, which were transferred to Bahamas Resolve at the expense of Bahamian taxpayers in an effort to recapitalize BOB. The past negligence of James Smith involving CLICO (Bahamas) is such that he should never again have been tasked with doing anything for the benefit of Bahamian taxpayers! The annuity holders and the life & health policyholders, as a collective group, should have taken legal action against the Bahamian government for the failures of Dr. Brown and James Smith, among others, and also against the external auditors for their failure to disclose in their annual audit reports that the assets that should have been backing the obligations of CLICO (Bahamas) had been wrongfully allowed to be removed from the Bahamas.

The big problem for CLICO's Bahamian policyholders is that the assets derived from its insurance operations in the Bahamas were allowed to be moved outside of the Bahamas; accordingly, these assets were never ever readily available in our country to satisfy CLICO's obligations to its Bahamian policyholders. All of the following can be blamed for their significant part played in allowing (over many years) the flight of assets out of the Bahamas that should have been backing the Bahamian policyholders: (1) James Smith, then Governor of The Central Bank of The Bahamas, who must have granted the necessary exchange control approval for the premiums paid by the policyholders to be effectively converted to other currencies and invested outside the Bahamas; (2) Dr. Brown, our previous insurance commissioner (now retired and living off of Public Treasury) for his failure to properly regulate CLICO's insurance operations in the Bahamas; and (3) Deloitte & Touche (Bahamas) for failing to report in its audit reports that management and the Board of CLICO Bahamas had repeatedly failed to disclose in the annual audited financial statements the very significant concentration of the company's assets effectively denominated in currencies other than the Bahamian dollar which, had this been done, would have at least put the Bahamian policyholders on notice that the company had moved its assets outside of our country and beyond the control of our local regulators. Yup, James Smith, Dr. Brown and Deloitte & Touche Bahamas all helped contribute to the 'royal shafting' received by CLICO's Bahamian policyholders. And now Christie is wrongfully seeking to transfer the losses incurred by the annuity holders and policyholders of a private enterprise on to the backs of honest hard working Bahamian taxpayers. Many of the greedy annuity holders, e.g. several 'prominent' members of the Maynard family, had been lured for years by the overly generous rates of return that they received on their annuities issued by or through CLICO (Bahamas); they ought to have known the very high yields came with great risk of loss. Why in the hell should these greedy investors now be bailed out by honest hard working Bahamian taxpayers? Had these investments proven highly profitable to the annuity holders, you can be rest assured they would not have been willing to share a penny of their profits with their fellow Bahamian taxpayers. Someone needs to sit down with Christie and explain to him what moral hazard is all about!

With respect to the external auditors, Deloitte & Touche (D&T), the financial statements of CLICO Bahamas and CLICO Enterprises did provide sufficient disclosures of their underlying investments outside of the Bahamas. However, D&T failed to disclose in their audit reports that the Bahamian regulators (then James Smith at the Central Bank and Dr. Brown at the Registrar of Insurance Companies) had "enabled" both CLICO Bahamas and CLICO Enterprises to violate local statutes and related regulations by effectively transferring the bulk of their real assets abroad (real assets that should have remained in the Bahamas to back the obligations of CLICO Bahamas to its annuity holders and policyholders) in exchange for related party inter-company loans and advances bearing unusually high yields in order to accommodate the usually high yields being paid to annuity holders in the Bahamas. D&T, Smith and Brown all ought to have known, simply by virtue of the unusually high interest rates being earned on borrowings from related parties abroad and in turn being paid to annuity holders in the Bahamas, that both CLICO Bahamas and CLICO Enterprises were increasingly becomingly nothing more than highly inappropriate Bahamian incorporated (and supposedly regulated) vehicles for the purpose of raising funds in the Bahamas from annuity holders and policyholders to make very inappropriate high risk speculative investments in other jurisdictions. In other words, Smith, Brown and D&T each failed in their duties to the annuity holders and policyholders of CLICO Bahamas by not blowing the whistle much sooner on the massive defrauding that occurred over several years right under their noses.

I stand corrected by you as regards the actual role played by D&T in this financial debacle. Christie, by agreeing to take from honest working taxpayers in order to bail out the greedy annuity holders of CLICO Bahamas, like the Maynard family, has effectively admitted its guilt by virtue of the regulatory failures on the part of James Smith (then Governor of the Central Bank) and Dr. R. Brown (then Registrar of Insurance Companies).

I think you more accurately intended to say: "Christie...has effectively admitted 'his government's' guilt..."