Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell says that the lack of financial statements showing the historic performance of the Marketing and National Importing Board (MNIB) is contributing to the delay in the government’s ability to reach an agreement with a new partner.
‘The main challenge we had was that the MNIB was so poorly run that there were no financial statements for many many years and as we attempt to get a private partner to partner with us we have to have those financial statements,’ he said during his interactive talk show ‘DMs with the PM’.
‘So, we have given instructions to try and accelerate this but when statutory bodies don’t do they financials and are not run properly and the government has to bail it out, that is the kind of challenge we face, where we cant even present an investor with a financial statement to tell the historic performance of the entity,’ Mitchell said.
In July 2022, Prime Minister Mitchell, who at the time also held minister of finance portfolio, said that the MNIB would be shut down and the law establishing the statutory body would be be repealed allowing for a new entity to be created under a public private partnership.
At the time the MNIB was facing financial challenges and in February 2023, the government paid severance and other termination benefits to all eighty-seven staff members to the tune of EC$2.67 million (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents).
The government then appointed a six-member broad-based technical working group to deal with the establishment of an appropriate public private partnership to support the sustainable growth of the agriculture sector.
In August 2023, the government announced the successful refinancing of the estimated five million dollars of debt owed by the MNIB to a local commercial bank.
The terms of the new arrangement included consolidating all outstanding principal balances of debt owed by MNIB at an interest rate of four per cent to be repaid over a period of 10 years, an interest free loan for all outstanding interest to date to be repaid over 10 years and the release of all existing securities to be replaced with a charge on the Consolidated Fund.
In March this year, Finance Minister Dennis Cornwall said that the life span of the entity known as the Marketing and National Importing Board would end before the third quarter of this year, because the government had established a new entity to replace the statutory body which was established more than 45 years ago.
Delivering the 2025 national budget to Parliament on March7, Cornwall said that the government had taken ‘decisive’ steps to address the longstanding financial management and inefficiencies plaguing the MNIB.
Cornwall said to this end, a new company – Import-Export Agromart (IMEXA) Ltd – had been established and legal and financial experts were developing prospectus and legal agreements to engage a suitable strategic partner and have the new entity up and running before the end of third quarter 2025