Dominica’s Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Roosevelt Skerrit has defended his government’s use of the overdraft facility and state that his government has been prudent in its spending. His comments came after accusations from opposition leader Lennox Linton during the 2020/21 budget debate in Parliament accusing the Skerrit led administration of being “reckless” with the facility.
Parliament approved an overdraft facility of fifty-six million-five hundred thousand dollars to meet the central government’s current overdraft requirements and another sum of five million dollars to meet the guarantee of statuary boards and public corporations totaling sixty-one million five hundred thousand dollars.
The opposition leader told Parliament that he was concerned about the figures. “At the close of the last financial year, 2019/20 on June 30, 2020, the estimates before this Honorable House now puts the government overdraft at 56 million dollars on account of, the fact that a 125 million dollar none performing portion of that overdraft, was converted to a long term debt…the evidence is clear Mr. Speaker that the government continued the illegal increase of overdraft facilities up to 181 million dollars, a 19.5 million dollars above the legal limit, before the bank, it would appear, was forced to pull the breaks at the end of 2019,” Linton said.
But in response, Skerrit stoutly defended the government’s use of the overdraft facility. “And so Mr. Speaker, you will see that this government has had a near-perfect track record of amortizing the overdraft at the financial year. But with all of these external shocks including natural disasters, where the normal reaction of any government would have been to send people home, don’t pay your debt, dramatically cut on social safety net programs, cut on public sector investment programs, don’t fix peoples home and you stick within your circumstances,” he said.
According to Skerrit, the one or two times that his government has gone over the overdraft limit; it was transferred into a loan, “which is what previous government has done.”