At the press conference of the Government of Aruba on Monday morning, Prime Minister Evelyn Wever-Croes elaborated extensively on the conditions of the Netherlands. When Covid came to our door, the government agreed to three conditions from the Netherlands to get money for our people to survive. The Prime Minister informed that two of these conditions are working well.
The COHO that later became the mutual agreement that the government signed in April. This agreement is in full force. The country package is also doing well. The RAft law is still waiting to see what will happen.
COUNTRY PACKAGES
Regarding the Country Package, the Prime Minister demonstrated in an accompanying graphic, how the Country Package is being attended. The graphic shows three colors, orange, green and red. The government publishes the reports on the implementation of the Country Packages every quarter and sends them to the Parliament of Aruba. In the quarterly reports, the Government indicates how the Country Package management is progressing and what are the steps that will take.
ARUBA IS COMPLYING WITH THE AGREEMENTS
You can see in the green graph that it indicates when the actions are doing well. Orange indicates that the actions are worrisome, and red indicates that they are not going well. In the first column, you can see that Aruba is doing well, with very little orange and nothing red and the vast majority green. This indicates that the reforms are proceeding according to plan. Note in the second column the difference between Curacao and Sint Maarten. Curacao is a bit more challenging than Aruba to cope with the reforms. Curacao is more in orange, in red, and less in green. Sint Maarten is doing slightly better than Curaçao and slightly more challenging than Aruba. Aruba is fulfilling the promises made in the November 2020 mutual agreement.
RAFT (Kingdom Law for Aruba Financial Supervision)
The Prime Minister emphasized that the only one of the three conditions that remained pending was the RAFT Law. The government negotiated with the Netherlands very intensively to achieve some changes in the RAft concept that the Netherlands presented to Aruba in the first instance. The government has agreed to send these laws to be processed so that Aruba receives advice from the Advisory Council of Aruba and the Netherlands Council of State. We knew that the Advisory Council of Aruba and the Council of State will give Aruba the right. They accepted some changes. However, in the negotiations with the Netherlands, they were not willing to go further and accept more changes in the RAft, the Prime Minister indicated.
The Prime Minister noted that as the Government of Aruba has previewed, both the Advisory Council of Aruba and the Council of State of the Netherlands have had many critics in their advices and do not believe that the RAft law is the best instrument for Aruba right now.
