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Friday, July 18, 2025

T&T Chamber: No one held accountable for CL debacle

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20140328

The T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (TTCIC) is con­cerned that no one has been held ac­count­able for the CL Fi­nan­cial cri­sis and the rip­ple ef­fects it had on the lo­cal econ­o­my.On Wednes­day at the Hy­att in Port-of-Spain while ad­dress­ing the group's post-an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing (AGM) busi­ness din­ner, new­ly re-elect­ed TTCIC pres­i­dent Mooni­lal Lalchan said: "The lev­els of cor­rup­tion at all lev­els, whether per­ceived or re­al, is eat­ing away at our at­tempts at gov­er­nance and trans­paren­cy, caus­ing us to rank low­ly year af­ter year, as a na­tion, on many in­ter­na­tion­al in­dices. To date, not one sin­gle per­son has been held ac­count­able for the CL Fi­nan­cial de­ba­cle, which has cost tax­pay­ers bil­lions of dol­lars."

Lalchan said im­ple­men­ta­tion of prop­er pub­lic pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion is mov­ing at snail's pace, thus fur­ther­ing the per­ceived or re­al per­cep­tion of cor­rup­tion."We be­lieve that pro­cure­ment re­form is crit­i­cal, and rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing the cur­rent sys­tem will bring ben­e­fits to our na­tion through more ef­fi­cient use of tax­pay­ers' mon­ey," he said.The cham­ber pres­i­dent al­so tack­led the is­sue of cam­paign fi­nance re­form say­ing: "Fund­ing of po­lit­i­cal cam­paigns has an im­pact that goes be­yond elec­tions. As we have stat­ed on pre­vi­ous oc­ca­sions, we can­not con­tin­ue to fo­cus on the detri­men­tal ef­fects of crime, with­out fo­cus­ing on the ef­fect that se­cre­cy in cam­paign fi­nanc­ing has on the pub­lic per­cep­tion of wrong­do­ing at the high­est lev­els of so­ci­ety."The Cham­ber is in full sup­port of cam­paign fi­nanc­ing leg­is­la­tion that man­dates full dis­clo­sure by all elect­ed of­fi­cials of cam­paign funds re­ceived and we will con­tin­ue our call in this area.

Lalchan, who is serv­ing his sec­ond con­sec­u­tive term at the helm of the TTCIC, will pre­side over the Cham­ber as it cel­e­brates a mile­stone 135 years of serv­ing the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty of T&T, the or­gan­i­sa­tion said in a re­lease.In the re­lease an­nounc­ing his re-elec­tion, Lalchan said: "Our vi­sion to­day–to be the voice of busi­ness in the on­go­ing de­vel­op­ment to­wards a strong sus­tain­able na­tion­al econ­o­my–is, most like­ly much the same as it was when we were es­tab­lished in 1879."


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