WILLEMSTAD - The government has never made a formal request to the Netherlands to be able to borrow money to finance an additional 200 million guilders for the new hospital in Otrabanda (HNO).
That can be deduced from the words of Minister of Health, Environment and Nature, Suzanne Camelia-Römer.
As is known, the government wants to borrow the 200 million on the local market. Earlier financing for the HNO was provided by the Netherlands at a lower interest rate than on the island. The current interest rate on Curacao is around five percent, while the interest rates in the Netherlands are around two percent.
It seems that the government wanted to borrow from a local consortium at all costs and deliberately kept the Netherlands out of play. According to Camelia-Römer, there were indications that the Netherlands did not want to grant a loan and therefore no formal request was made.
According to the minister those indications came from Central Bank’s board member Ersilia de Lannoy, as head of the government delegation of the Growth Agreement. She would have asked for a loan. And the instructions come from informal discussions with the Financial Supervision Board (Cft), according to the minister. That while the Cft is not a conversation partner in this. The minister should have approached the Netherlands directly with an official request for help if she would like to borrow there. That never happened.