The Bar­ba­dos-based Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB) has ac­knowl­edged “an on­go­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive process” in­volv­ing its pres­i­dent, Dr Hy­gi­nus ‘Gene’ Leon, but re­mained silent on re­ports that se­nior of­fi­cials of the re­gion’s pre­mier fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion had been sent on ad­min­is­tra­tive leave.

Ear­li­er, the Caribbean Me­dia Cor­po­ra­tion (CMC) had re­port­ed that it was re­li­ably in­formed that se­nior of­fi­cials of the CDB had been sent on ad­min­is­tra­tive leave, but that its sources could not pro­vide fur­ther de­tails at this time.

How­ev­er in a terse one para­graph state­ment late on Wednes­day night, the bank said “Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank ac­knowl­edges an on­go­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive process in­volv­ing the Pres­i­dent. The Bank will not be mak­ing any fur­ther com­ments on this in­ter­nal mat­ter at this time”.

The state­ment fol­lowed the ear­li­er an­nounce­ment by the bank Wednes­day that it had post­poned to next month, its an­nu­al news con­fer­ence where it was ex­pect­ed to out­line rec­om­men­da­tions on how it in­tend­ed to har­ness re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al al­liances to bro­ker new part­ner­ships for holis­tic and in­clu­sive de­vel­op­ment.

The news con­fer­ence was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for Tues­day next week, but the one para­graph state­ment an­nounc­ing the post­pone­ment to Feb­ru­ary 20, gave no rea­son.

“The Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB) will now be hold­ing its 2024 An­nu­al News Con­fer­ence on Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 20, 2024. Sub­se­quent up­dates will be shared di­rect­ly and pub­lished via Face­book, In­sta­gram, and LinkedIn,” the state­ment said.

But when asked by CMC for the rea­sons for the post­pone­ment, the CDB re­spond­ed say­ing “the Bank’s teams need­ed more time”.

When it an­nounced the sched­uled news con­fer­ence ear­li­er this month, the CDB said that it would be held un­der the theme “Fa­cil­i­tat­ing Re­silient Pros­per­i­ty” at its head­quar­ters in Wildey, on the out­skirts of the cap­i­tal.

It said the par­tic­i­pants would have been Leon, the Vice Pres­i­dent Fi­nances and Cor­po­rate Ser­vices, Gre­go­ry N. Hill, the di­rec­tor of the Projects De­part­ment, Mrs. Therese Turn­er Jones and the di­rec­tor of the Eco­nom­ic De­part­ment, Ian Du­rant.

The state­ment had in­formed lo­cal and re­gion­al jour­nal­ists that they could ex­pect an overview of CDB’s strate­gies for re­source mo­bil­i­sa­tion, a re­view of 2023 re­gion­al eco­nom­ic per­for­mance and the fore­cast for 2024 as well as re­sults of the CDB-sup­port­ed projects im­ple­ment­ed in 2023

It said that a pre­view of planned projects, ra­tio­nale and ex­pect­ed out­comes for 2024 would have al­so been made dur­ing the news con­fer­ence.

Leon is the sixth pres­i­dent of the re­gion­al de­vel­op­ment fi­nance in­sti­tu­tion. He was elect­ed at a spe­cial meet­ing of the CDB Board of Gov­er­nors held on Jan­u­ary 19, 2021 for a five-year term, and as­sumed of­fice on May 4, 2021.

The high­ly re­gard­ed St. Lu­cian-born econ­o­mist heads a team of more than 200 em­ploy­ees head­quar­tered in Bridgetown, and came to the as­sign­ment with 35 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in eco­nom­ics, fi­nan­cial pol­i­cy de­vel­op­ment and ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment, more than 20 of which were spent work­ing with the Wash­ing­ton-based In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF). He had suc­ceed­ed the Ja­maican-born Dr. War­ren Smith who re­tired in 2021 af­ter serv­ing as pres­i­dent for 10 years.

Last week, Leon was in Guyana hold­ing talks with the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) chair­man, Guyana’s Pres­i­dent Ir­faan Ali and CARI­COM Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Dr Car­la Bar­nett.

By Pe­ter Richards

BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos, Jan 17, CMC

CMC/pr/ir/2024