WILLEMSTAD – Former candidate minister of Economic Development Neysa Schoop-Isenia, took action this week and filed a lawsuit with the National Criminal Investigation Department against the Central Bank CBCS and against interim president Leila Matroos-Lasten.
While the acting president of the CBCS has an “absolute secrecy obligation”, according to the lawsuit it is certainly not inconceivable that Matroos-Lasten “wanted to obstruct and at least influence the screening process to appoint Schoop-Isenia as minister.” “This is not, however, the task of the Central Bank.”
Reference is made to the e-mail string concerning an internal confidential memo regarding Schoop-Isenia over the period that she had worked at the Girobank in 2013 – incidentally in a non-policy-making position – that Matroos-Lasten sent to the personal mail of Finance Minister Kenneth Gijsbertha on 22 March this year.
The lawsuit shows that there have been more attempts to leak the disputed information on the memo. Member of Parliament for the coalition party MAN, Giselle Mc William stated that Allison Manuel had already informed her on 8 March of the existence of this memo and, above all, damaging report about the candidate minister.
And Etienne Rosario reports that a senior Central Bank official (not yet named) would have given Prime Minister Eugene Rhuggenaath the documents, presumably the e-mail string. This happened on March 9. The content of the memo was therefore “on the street” before. Schoop-Isenia understands that when earlier “more informal” distribution – with the aim of deliberately obstructing her nomination as minister – failed, the email to Gijsbertha followed.
According to Schoop-Isenia, all this is a violation of the National Banking and Credit Supervision Regulation and it does not exclude the possibility that the screening act was also violated. The Central Bank and Matroos-Lasten are not designated as advisory or controlling bodies in the screening scheme.
“The latter did not, however, prevent them from taking action to influence the screening process or at least intentionally in a negative sense for the undersigned,” says the Schoop-Isenia lawsuit, which previously did not know the existence of the memo and never had the opportunity to respond to it
Gijsbertha has publicly stated that he has received the information from Matroos-Lasten unsolicited.
According to the lawsuit, the Acting President indicated that “her reason for this” was that she would have “discreetly” carried out sending the confidential documents unofficially to the Minister.
Schoop-Isenia claims that the Central Bank and Matroos-Lasten have “consciously” violated the confidentiality obligation imposed on them, “which is punishable”. She asks the National Criminal Investigation Department to involve the following persons in the investigation: Minister Gijsbertha, Ersilia ‘Zus’ de Lannooy (who as an officer of the CBCS forwarded the e-mail string to Matroos-Lasten’s secretary), the management secretary, Alison Manuel, Etienne Rosario and Giselle Mc William.
This is according to the lawsuit of May 23. The discussions last week to arrive at a mutual arrangement, which at least cleans the name of the 37-year-old Schoop-Isenia (now in a high financial position at Aqualectra), has not yet produced any results.
