Sean Nero

A for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter says a scarci­ty of in­no­v­a­tive minds lo­cal­ly is why T&T is strug­gling to hit the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion mark.Con­rad Enill, who spoke at a re­cent post-Bud­get fo­rum host­ed by East­er Cred­it Union, said the pri­vate sec­tor is fail­ing in terms of di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

"The fact of the mat­ter is in a hy­dro-based car­bon province where the gov­ern­ment is the ma­jor provider of goods and ser­vices and the ma­jor pur­chas­er, the eas­i­er thing to do is to go and talk to them and get them to sup­port your busi­ness," he said.

"The more dif­fi­cult thing, which is re­al­ly and tru­ly deal­ing with the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion agen­da, has to hap­pen with a group of in­di­vid­u­als who are now not in the cur­rent pri­vate sec­tor and are look­ing to move from sav­ings mo­bil­i­sa­tion in­to wealth cre­ation. I think that's the biggest op­por­tu­ni­ty that the cred­it union sec­tor has."

Enill said he was con­fused by the ut­ter­ances of En­er­gy Min­is­ter Nicole Olivierre and Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert on Gov­ern­ment's trans­porta­tion pol­i­cy. He won­dered how Olivierre could be ad­vanc­ing the po­si­tion that a CNG mod­el is to be rolled out, while Im­bert was mov­ing full speed ahead to de­vel­op a rapid rail sys­tem.

"My own view is we need to go with CNG in the short term be­cause it can bring down the cost of trans­porta­tion. We can use the sav­ings on diesel for ex­port be­cause right now it is cost­ing us $5.45 mar­ket price to re­fine the prod­uct and we are get­ting TT$1.75 for it, so we are los­ing lots of mon­ey. We could con­vert that in­to rev­enue."

Com­ment­ing on plans to gen­er­ate rev­enue by re­duc­ing val­ue added tax from (VAT) 1to 12.5 per cent, Enill said he was un­able to analyse the phi­los­o­phy and de­scribed Im­bert's de­sire to do so as "mag­i­cal."

"I don't un­der­stand how it is go­ing to move from $5 bil­lion in 2014 to $10 bil­lion this year, and the on­ly thing that you have done, you have re­duced the rate. You haven't changed any­thing else. The ex­pen­di­ture is the same. There is less ac­tiv­i­ty.

"I looked at the en­er­gy com­pa­nies where some­times you get VAT be­cause of large trans­ac­tions. So I am not sure how this num­ber is go­ing to be ar­rived at. In my own view, that num­ber is clos­er to $4 bil­lion be­cause I think you are go­ing to lose some, as well. You're go­ing to lose some from the change in the small busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty," Enill said.