WILLEMSTAD – Curaçao’s latest Financial Management Report provides a broad look at the financial condition of government-owned companies, statutory institutions and subsidized foundations, revealing that financial health varies significantly across entities connected to the public sector.
The June report includes extensive appendices showing information from the latest available annual accounts of government participations and other public or subsidized institutions.
The government evaluates entities using indicators including solvency and liquidity.
For solvency, the report uses a debt ratio based on the relationship between total assets and liabilities, with a desired value of between 1.5 and 2.0. For liquidity, it uses the current ratio, with a desired range of 1.0 to 1.5.
Entities are then visually classified in the report as financially healthy, concerning or insolvent/illiquid depending on their ratios.
The tables cover a wide range of organizations, including government-owned companies, the General Pension Fund of Curaçao, the Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten, funds administered by SVB, the University of Curaçao, the Bureau Telecommunication and Post, the Fair Trade Authority Curaçao and numerous subsidized foundations.
For government-owned companies, the report includes information such as the government’s ownership percentage, historical acquisition value, intrinsic value, financial relationships with Curaçao, dividends, annual results and financial-health indicators.
The foundation tables additionally show government subsidies and the year of the latest available annual accounts.
However, the data require careful interpretation.
Not every entity is being measured using financial statements from the same year. In some cases, the latest annual accounts available to the Ministry of Finance are several years old. That means a weak ratio in the appendix does not necessarily describe an institution’s financial position today.
The tables nevertheless provide the government with a tool for identifying entities requiring closer monitoring and show the scale of Curaçao’s financial exposure beyond the ministries themselves.
The report also acknowledges a broader problem involving timely financial information from government entities. Curaçao’s financial-management program identifies the availability of financial figures from public entities as a continuing bottleneck, one that the government says will require clearer regulations.
For that reason, the appendix is best viewed as a financial warning system rather than a definitive ranking of which government companies or foundations are currently in trouble.