Development Bank Audit Reveals $20M Missing; Special Prosecutor Retained

Six months after the ousting of the Timothy Harris-led Unity administration following its precipitous demise in March of 2022, a Special Prosecutor has been retained by the Development Bank to hold the outgoing administration accountable for the disappearance of some twenty million Eastern Caribbean Dollars (EC$20 million).

Team Unity under the leadership of Dr. Timothy Harris was founded in 2013 with the mandate to usher in what it called “a new paradigm of transparency, good governance, and the rule of law” for the benefit of the citizenry of St. Kitts and Nevis. Not long after the installation of the new administration in 2015, concerns were raised regarding purported abuses of governmental authority, victimization of civil servants, nepotism and cronyism, out-of-control public corruption, and concealment of public information such as the IMF Article IV consultation on the economy of St. Kitts and Nevis. Furthermore, the Harris administration was accused by the then opposition, the St. Kitts Nevis Labour Party of gutting the Public Accounts Committee legislation, further undermining the Committee’s already limited ability to exercise its oversight responsibilities.

Mr. Lenworth Harris, who had been relieved of his position of Chief Executive Officer of the Development Bank in 2014 due to allegations of egregious wrongdoing documented in a 2013 report on the bank, was quickly reinstated by his brother, the new Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, when the Unity Administration came to power in February 2015. According to reports by undisclosed sources in the Development Bank, the Board of Directors of the Bank could not and / or did not exercise nearly the level of control and oversight of the reinstalled CEO as it ought to. The informants lamented that the standards of governance in the bank became far too lax, and there was no guarantee that the Development Bank chief or the Board was honouring their fiduciary responsibility.

When the new Dr. Terrance Drew-led administration came to office in August of last year, with a view to getting to the bottom of the countless looming questions, a new bank interim CEO was installed and it became immediately clear after cursory analysis that the former CEO had run amok in the bank. Later in 2022, a Canadian accounting firm was retained to perform a forensic audit on the Development Bank, the outcome of which is that $20 million has gone unaccounted for.