By ieyenews
Copyright ieyenews
Peter Polack
By Peter Polack
The new Jamaican track sensation Oblique Seville recently became the 100m king in Tokyo as his hero Usain Bolt looked on. It had been nine years ago since Bolt captured a similar glory in Rio de Janeiro.
Regrettably, time had not been kind to the much revered sprinter who saw his retirement fund disappear down the Jamaican government regulated Stocks and Securities Limited bankruptcy or rabbit hole, two years ago.
Like Oblique, it may take nine years for Usain to see any semblance of his hard earned savings despite promised payouts of one sort or another.
The new prime minister of Jamaica although a former client of SSL was not caught in this particular web of iniquity having closed his account before the scandal.
The Teflon Don indeed.
Whilst scrutiny of the missing funds have centered on criminal and civil proceedings in the media, very little has come out about the body ultimately responsible for oversight of the failed institution, the Financial Services Commission.
The FSC chairman was former Bank of Jamaica Deputy Governor John Robinson and a director was Langston Sibblies, former Deputy Managing Director of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, both from 2021. Neither of these overseers of SSL have come forward with explanations about the disaster or apologized to Usain Bolt or other creditors.
Robinson and Sibblies were replaced after the scandal broke.
Many promises for commissions of enquiry followed, secure in the knowledge that the criminal and civil proceedings could take a decade.
Worry for another day.
Echoes of the FINSAC bank failures of several decades ago reverberate in the modern fraud trends, the most recent being J$400M from a major Jamaican bank.
Other Caribbean islands have not escaped this particular disaster such as Antigua with the massive Allen Stanford fraud.
The recurring decimal.
Oblique is on the inside track to follow past Jamaican heroes of speed but he is forewarned from storing his earnings in any faux regulated institutions or he will be high and dry.
Tempting as it is, no amount of Crystal Blue Persuasion should bring him to that unfortunate destiny.
Peter Polack
His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.
