Liberal Vannin leader Kate Beecroft MHK says it is 'utter nonsense' to suggest the party is against economic growth.

LibVan members voted against the government's ?50,000 economic development fund, claiming that there were not enough safeguards for such a large investment of public money.

Mrs Beecroft said: 'The Chief Minister’s tirade against LibVan is getting to be rather tiresome and predictable. This week we have, yet again, been accused of being against economic growth because we voted against the ?50,000,000 economic development
fund.

'The Chief Minister's accusations are exactly what they look like – utter nonsense. Why would anyone not want to have growth that will put more money into the coffers to pay for the services that we all want?'

She said the proposed terms of the new fund were too flexible, that there is an anticipated failure rate of between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of all investments but the expected aggregate rate of return is only five per cent, and that LibVan believes the fund should be managed by a committee rather than a single fund manager to minimise the risk of actual or perceived conflict of interest.

Mrs Beecroft said Tynwald members weren't given enough time to study changes to the proposal, with amended papers issued during the sitting, adding: 'Mr Thomas, who had returned to his desk early, had spotted one significant change which was that the original papers proposed the money for this fund to come out of revenue whilst the revised papers showed it coming from revenue or reserves.

'Just how can any MHK vote for anything that they haven’t had time to study? We were told that the main changes were typing errors but when these were discovered the Motion should have either been withdrawn until next month or the differences identified verbally and in Hansard. It is simply not good enough to expect us all to take everything at face value.'

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