WILLEMSTAD - The government "regrets the state of affairs", referring to the fact that the governor of Curaçao cannot sign the 2022 budget and therefore the government cannot publish it.
Prime Minister Gilmar Pisas writes to parliament. “However, the government is going into the further process with conviction to reach agreement with the Netherlands and to achieve results in the implementation of the National Package, in the interest of everyone in Curaçao, always with the mission and vision to guarantee our autonomy.”
Curaçao has started the new year without a national budget after Governor Lucille George-Wout has put a stop to its publication. This is again related to the Kingdom Council of Ministers (RMR) that on December 17, 2021, did not deal with Curaçao's request to deviate from the standard of a balanced budget.
And that is again because Curaçao, like Aruba and Sint Maarten for that matter, did not agree with the amendment of the proposal for the Kingdom Act Coho (Caribbean Body for Reform and Development), on which official agreement had already been reached on December 2, 2021.
Pisas in his letter to parliament: "Due to the position taken by the government, the RMR has postponed the decision until the next meeting on January 21, 2022, in order to give the governments of the different countries the time to reach a political agreement on the amendment.” In the meantime, his cabinet is forced to use the budget of the previous year of service, that of 2021.
In accordance with the Financial Supervision Act (Rft), the countries of Curaçao and Sint Maarten may only have a deficit in the the budget with the consent of the Kingdom Council of Ministers in The Hague.
In his letter to the President of Parliament, Pisas reports that the budget for the 2022 service year has been approved by the Parliament of Curaçao with a deficit of 162.1 million guilders (which is, incidentally, considerably lower than the Curaçao Advisory Council's advice on the amended draft budget for 2022, i.e. 256.7 million). The Minister of Finance did not answer previous questions about the level of the budget deficit.
