Shared Central Bank Curaçao and St.Maarten

December 01, 2008 5:39 AM

The new autonomous Caribbean Kingdom countries Curaçao and St.Maarten will get a new, shared central bank and a new currency. This was agreed upon during the political Steering Committee meeting in St.Maarten.

The two future countries will cooperate on the establishment and regulation of this and other components of the monetary system which they will be sharing. “The most logical name coming to mind is the ‘Dutch Caribbean Central Bank”, said Deputy Sarah Wescot-Williams during the press conference yesterday evening in the Westin Hotel at Dawn Beach. It was a visibly more highly spirited Wescot-Williams than four hours earlier when she demonstratively left the meeting room with her delegation. “We’ve just been sitting there all that time and nobody tells us anything”, says the St.Maarten politician, who herself had been late the day before.

Walking out was not very strategic, she admits later on: it purely was because ‘the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles and Curaçao were holding all sorts of conclaves while St.Maarten wasn’t informed’. The three other delegations were indeed discussing the consensus Kingdom Act Police.

There will also be a new currency in the Kingdom. Curaçao and St.Maarten will release it together. It doesn’t have a name yet. Wescot-Williams had a suggestion: “Dutch Caribbean Guilder or Dutch Caribbean Florin are possibilities but I spoke to someone – a journalist from Curaçao – who suggested ‘Sarah’ as a good name. Who knows?”
Other affairs on which agreements were made during the political steering committee meeting in St. Maarten or about which decisions were made had to do with police organization, the examination advice committee which will give her opinion on legal texts in the course of the process, the consensus Kingdom Act Financial Supervision, debt remission, asset distribution and allocation of funds, corporate governance, finalization of assets and debt after the transition and a concept-Kingdom Act for amendments in the Statute.

(Source: National newspaper Amigoe)

27 November, 2008