KINGSTOWN–The share­hold­er gov­ern­ments of re­gion­al air­line, LI­AT, will meet in Bar­ba­dos to­day, but a planned meet­ing in Bridgetown with T&T's Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar will not ma­te­ri­alise, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Ralph Gon­salves has said.He told a news con­fer­ence his T&T coun­ter­part was un­able to at­tend the meet­ing be­cause Par­lia­ment would be meet­ing on the same day.

Gon­salves, who serves as chair­man of the share­hold­ers, said the meet­ing with Per­sad-Bisses­sar would have dealt with on­go­ing con­cerns with the T&T-owned Caribbean Air­lines (CAL).

"What I have sug­gest­ed to her is that as chair­man of the share­hold­ers I will come down to Trinidad with the chair­man of the board of di­rec­tors, Dr Jean Hold­er, and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Cap­tain Ian Brun­ton...and oth­er per­sons to talk about some is­sues be­cause we want to see at the po­lit­i­cal lev­el how we can strength­en the nexus be­tween our­selves and CAL."Gon­salves has in the past said he wants to en­gage in dis­cus­sions, not a fight with T&T, over the fu­el sub­sidy Port-of-Spain pro­vides to CAL.

In Feb­ru­ary, he told re­porters he had re­ceived a le­gal opin­ion on the mat­ter and was seek­ing talks with the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion.Gon­salves con­tends that the fu­el sub­sidy giv­en to CAL con­tra­venes the treaty gov­ern­ing Cari­com and that the le­gal opin­ion sup­ports his view that it con­tra­venes the Re­vised Treaty of Ch­aguara­mas.LI­AT has in the past com­plained that it is put at a dis­ad­van­tage be­cause of the fu­el sub­sidy pro­vid­ed to CAL.

Trade Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath will lead a high-lev­el team to Ja­maica in a few weeks to ham­mer out an arrange­ment with that coun­try's gov­ern­ment on CAL, in­clud­ing plans to dras­ti­cal­ly re­duce flights to Ja­maica.Ja­maica's Fi­nance Min­is­ter Omar Davis told the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on Tues­day dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the 2013/14 Sec­toral De­bate, that the team will vis­it ei­ther late this month, or in June.

Davies said the de­ci­sion to cut the flights was be­low the min­i­mum lev­el re­quired by the agree­ment which grant­ed CAL per­mis­sion for use of the Air Ja­maica brand name. He said CAL has had con­tin­u­ing chal­lenges in meet­ing its oblig­a­tions to the Nor­man Man­ley In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, the Ja­maica Civ­il Avi­a­tion Au­thor­i­ty and Ja­maica Cus­toms.