Raphael John-Lall

Trade Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath in­tends to stream­line agen­cies at the Min­istry of Trade to make their op­er­a­tions more ef­fi­cient. He said: "About three weeks ago I made a state­ment that T&T in three years time will be among the top des­ti­na­tions in the world in terms of the ease of do­ing busi­ness. We cur­rent­ly stand at num­ber 68 in the world. Six weeks ago on join­ing the Min­istry, we had three min­istries and 13 agen­cies re­spon­si­ble for the mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tion of T&T.

All this can be con­fus­ing while dis­si­pat­ing the lim­it­ed re­sources the Gov­ern­ment has at its dis­pos­al. Cab­i­net has been talk­ing about one agency pro­mot­ing and mar­ket­ing T&T and to be the fo­cal point for re­ceiv­ing all in­vest­ment, which is In­vest TT, al­though this re­quires some re­shap­ing and re­struc­tur­ing. This al­so ap­plies to Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (BDC) that we are stream­lin­ing."

Bharath was speak­ing on Thurs­day at the post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann's. He al­so spoke about oth­er "im­ped­i­ments" that have cre­at­ed a lack of con­fi­dence for for­eign in­vestors in the T&T econ­o­my. "It takes 43 days to es­tab­lish a busi­ness in T&T. I have al­ready met with the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) and the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB) and I have got com­mit­ments that by mak­ing a few changes that with­in a month or so we should be able to re­duce that 43 days to one day. So by au­tomat­ing a num­ber of process­es and by elim­i­nat­ing a num­ber of du­pli­ca­tions we can re­duce reg­is­ter­ing a busi­ness from 43 days to one day in T&T," he said.

He added that the Cab­i­net has ap­proved $39 mil­lion to com­plete the in­stal­la­tion of the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dows (SEW). "The ASY­CU­DA sys­tem was in­tro­duced for Cus­toms and Ex­cise that has been an on­go­ing process and go­ing through changes. We al­so have a sys­tem for the SEW which was im­ple­ment­ed in 2009. We im­ple­ment­ed six out of ten mod­ules so far in the SEW. Cab­i­net ap­proved $39 mil­lion to com­plete the in­stal­la­tion of the SEW over a four year pe­ri­od. This al­lows us to be more com­pet­i­tive," he said.