AG defends the hiring of White Oak
Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Dale Marshall has defended Government’s decision to engage the services of the London-based White Oak Advisory in the country’s restructuring efforts, contending that the state of the Barbados economy last May, did not give any leeway for a tendering process to be done.
He was speaking Sunday night at a political rally to mark the Mia Amor Mottley led administration’s first year in office, following its historic and unprecedented win at the polls. He told those gathered in Carlisle Carpark. The City, the Barbados Labour Party’s stomping ground, that had the current government waited to go to tender to engage help with the debt restructuring plan, the country would have been put in a far worse position than it had already been in, contending that Barbados at the time was on its “deathbed”.
“When we came to government we had no time to tender. If we had come to government and tendered, a tendering process by the time we got the ad in the papers would have taken two weeks; and then the tenders got to be out there for another six weeks cause you can’t find people in Barbados to do it, so you have to tender all over the world and then you have to make a decision… by then the patient called Barbados would have been stone cold dead,” he insisted.
The Attorney General continued, “The matter for discussion at our first Cabinet meeting was whether or not we should engage this same company White Oak that has done seven of the largest restructurings, seven of the last 11 restructurings over the last 10 years; a company with an impeccable record and we did it, we made the decision in our first Cabinet meeting”.
Marshall’s comments came as he said that the company was not unknown to the previous Government, indicating that there was correspondence sent to the Democratic Labour Party Administration as far back as 2011 by White Oak, offering to lend its expertise in addressing the debt situation. Marshall said that the company again sent correspondence to the Government in 2014 and 2017, but were on both occasions not taken up on the offer. He argued that had the former Government taken the offer, today there would be buses on the road and a better road infrastructure.
“This company White Oak that we are criticized for hiring, in 2011 on the 28th of June, 2011 wrote to the then Minister of Finance… and they introduced themselves to the government of Barbados and they said this - ‘In recent months we have been closely following developments in Barbados. We understand that there has been some deterioration in public debt indicators and that you are currently in discussions with the IMF over possible strategies for placing the debt burden on a declining path over the medium term. We would welcome an opportunity to present our credentials and to discuss with you how White Oak could leverage its sovereign debt management expertise to help the Barbadian government achieve its debt objective’,” he added.
Marshall’s remarks have come a few weeks after criticism was made both here and abroad about the use of White Oak and the hefty bill associated with that company’s services. This was sparked early last month when an article appeared in the UK’s Financial Times about the deal which was struck between Barbados and the company, soon after the BLP took a clean sweep at the polls. But Attorney General Marshall is adamant that there was nothing nefarious about the agreement, which he maintained has actually saved this country significant amounts of money over the last 12 months.
“White Oak came in and assisted this Barbados Labour Party Administration, saving us a billion dollars a year in interest payments… White Oak is saving us a billion dollars a year and their fees are millions of dollars. But we recognise that our situation was so grave, grave is the word, we were in the grave, that we had to find the finest, the finest skills that money could buy, to help to resurrect this country and White Oak was it,” he maintained.
Meanwhile, Marshall voiced some concern about the relationship between the external creditors and company they have engaged for advice to recover the debt owed them. He raised the alarm while revealing that the said company, an independent advisory firm, had previously done work in Barbados under the previous DLP administration. (JRT)