Nadaleen Singh

The mid-year re­view of the na­tion­al bud­get may be "a bit larg­er than last year," Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai said yes­ter­day, al­though he ad­mit­ted that he has not seen the fi­nal fig­ure yet.It is not un­usu­al for the Gov­ern­ment to go back to Par­lia­ment to re­quest sup­ple­men­tal fund­ing for projects/plans in var­i­ous min­istries.

"A big chunk of what we are ask­ing for, re­lates to the wage set­tle­ments and so on for 2008 to 2010, I think," Howai told re­porters af­ter cut­ting the rib­bon to open the Tech­nol­o­gy Ex­po­si­tion 2013 at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain."That three year pe­ri­od has been hang­ing for quite a while and I thought one of the im­por­tant things for me to do was to make sure that I clean that up, so we will be go­ing for­ward to ask for ap­proval to set­tle all those back ne­go­ti­a­tions.

"You will prob­a­bly see some peo­ple per­haps demon­strat­ing and so on.That is be­cause we nor­mal­ly would not put the amount in the bud­get and the rea­son we don't do that is we don't want to sig­nal what our set­tle­ment po­si­tion is, from our point of view, we com­plete the ne­go­ti­a­tions and then we go to get the ap­proval."Howai said he hadn't seen all the de­tailed num­bers but the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) is like­ly to get the largest amont for set­tle­ment of wages for dai­ly paid work­ers.

Com­ment­ing on the half year re­sults, he said: "The rev­enues are up and the ex­pens­es are down, which is good and bad, in the sense that the man­age­ment of ex­pens­es, you have to man­age your ex­pens­es but re­mem­ber part of the ex­pen­di­ture par­tic­u­lar­ly on the cap­i­tal side was in­tend­ed to gen­er­ate eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.There­fore there are some is­sues there which we need to ad­dress in terms of get­ting ac­tiv­i­ty go­ing and that ex­pen­di­ture out.

"I want­ed to make sure that I took a look at the process­es in terms of how it was go­ing to hap­pen, so I slowed some of the ex­pens­es down for us to take a look at it more close­ly, but on the oth­er hand, there are al­so some ca­pac­i­ty con­straints in the min­istry which have im­pact­ed on the abil­i­ty to get some of the projects up."

Howai said al­though over­all rev­enues haD­in­creased at the half-year mark, what con­tributed to the in­crease was that "oil and gas (rev­enues) are up but al­so oth­er rev­enues are up be­cause con­sumer spend­ing has been a lit­tle bit high­er than we had an­tic­i­pat­ed."