THE HAGUE--The Kingdom Council of Ministers on Friday did exactly as was anticipated: it gave St. Maarten an instruction to get its 2015 budget and multi-annual calculations in order. A number of measures have to materialise in a budget amendment before October 31.
“St. Maarten needs to have a realistic budget,” Dutch Minister of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations Ronald Plasterk told after Friday’s meeting in The Hague which was attended by the Ministers Plenipotentiary of Aruba, Curaçao and St. Maarten.
The Kingdom Government followed the advice of the Committee for Financial Supervision for Curaçao and St. Maarten CFT. The instruction orders the St. Maarten Government to compensate the deficits of previous years amounting to at least NAf. 60 million and to settle the payment arrears amounting to NAf. 189 million in the 2015-2018 budgets. The St. Maarten Government has a large debt to the Social Health Insurance Bureau SZV and the St. Maarten Pension Fund APS, but also to other third parties.
In addition, the St. Maarten Government will have to adapt the budget to fully include the pension and health care premiums. Also, concrete measures will need to be taken to reform the pension and health care insurance system which has become unaffordable in its current form. One of these measures is to increase the pensionable age from 60 to initially 62 and later on to 65.
St. Maarten will have until the end of 2016 to implement the necessary measures to ensure that it creates a tenable pension and health care insurance system. The CFT will decide whether the budget amendment and measures are adequate, it was stated in a press release issued by the Dutch Government on Friday afternoon.
“The Kingdom Council of Ministers deems it necessary to give this instruction at this time. St. Maarten has had ample time to take the measures, but repeatedly has omitted to do so, in spite of the fact that it promised to do so. The instruction serves to prevent that St. Maarten ends up in great financial problems,” it was stated.
