Tomorrow, one full month after it was first ordered by the Registrar of Cooperatives, the Northern Fishermen's Co-op will be holding a special general meeting. As we have reported, then Registrar Zeniada Moya ordered the meeting after she discovered a number of irregularities in Northern's accounts - including lavish, uncollateralized million dollar loans to board members, and hefty salary advances to senior administrators. Plenty for the Co-ops 600 plus members to discuss and that's why Moya ordered that it be held at the Holy Redeemer Parish Hall. But her orders were ignored by the board, which has elected to hold the meeting in its conference room, which can scarcely hold 100 members. And while they will be there to discuss the co-op's flagging performance (last year's profits were only 35 thousand dollars, on earnings of 14.5 million dollars) after the weighty matters are discussed, we take it that the good times will roll as beer tents were set up in the parking lot today.
And while former Registrar Moya has been transferred to the Ministry of Finance, after her tussle with Northern, she enters another hotbed as supervisor of credit unions in the Ministry of Finance. The credit unions' concern is that by transferring their oversight to the ministry of Finance, government is trying to place them under the banking act which would subject them to taxes and reserve requirements. Well, the Prime Minister yesterday met with the leaders of those unions to tell them that is not the case. The Prime Minister told the unions that the Ministry of Finance now hopes to supervise the unions more closely under their own act.