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Spat over IMF talks

A political spat has developed over the fact that the Jamaican government has sent a junior minister to lead Jamaica's preliminary round of talks with the International Monetary Fund.

On July 9, 2009, opposition spokesman on Finance Dr. Omar Davies described as bizarre the fact that the talks were being led by Senator Don Wehby, the junior finance minister who was scheduled to return to his private sector job at the end of July.

Dr. Davies said Shaw should have led the team in the sensitive negotiations with the IMF.

Dr. Davies also asked Prime Minister Bruce Golding to provide information to the country as to the likely terms of the IMF.

However, Jamaica's Finance Minister Audley Shaw has described Davies' statement as "mischief-making for political point-scoring."

According to Shaw, he realized that Davies was not in parliament when he noted that he had already met the Senior IMF representative at a hemispheric conference of finance ministers in Chile and wrote him a note accordingly.

Don Wehby

The Jamaican Finance Minister emphasized in a statement July 12, 2009 that the team led by Don Wehby was conducting exploratory talks with the IMF on a possible Standby Agreement for Foreign Exchange balance of Payment support.

Shaw says this is a precautionary measure, as Jamaica has lost one-point-three billion U.S. dollars in foreign exchange earnings, due to the impact of the global recession, which has resulted in the virtual shutdown of the island's bauxite sector as well as dramatically reduced earnings from remittances and tourism.

Many Jamaicans remember the IMF for its conditionalities, such as drastic job cuts in Jamaica's bloated public sector resulting in over twenty-five thousand jobs being cut from the public purse in the nineteen eighties. The Peoples National Party cut ties with the IMF shortly after it was returned to office in the nineteen nineties.

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