Bienvenido Alvarez Vega, Hoy newspaper’s editor, writes today on the insistence of the government to make the private sector, primarily the business community, pay additional taxes in order to cover the financial hole left by the mismanagement of commercial banks. Vega says the Mejia administration has already geared its economic policies in this direction. He writes that the business community has tried to resist, but without success, as the government is obliging the business sector to share the burden, for reasons Alvarez Vega cites as political in view of the imminent elections.
Vega questions whether, morally, the government should be threatening the financial viability of companies in order to salvage banks that are not even theirs and to whose bankruptcy they played no part in. Vega says the real responsibility for the banks’ woes should fall on the shoulders of the government, whose departments were both legally and technically responsible for not averting such a disaster. He writes that the Dominican government has not fostered independence of governmental agencies, but instead has secured the complicity of the private sector, knowing that out of chaos a government can reap inestimable yields.
He concludes by saying that the government is wrong to carry out a campaign to sway public opinion into feeling that the business community should bear the costs of salvaging the banks that collapsed because of a lack of government surveillance and supervision. “We should not continue to erode the finances of the nation’s productive sector in the name of a problem that supposedly belongs to everyone.” From the start, the government should have assisted the ailing institutions to stem the flow that has “contaminated the rest of society,” he writes, mentioning that there is still time for damage control – even though the damage has been done.