Sascha Wil­son

Po­lit­i­cal leader of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) and Le­gal Af­fairs Min­is­ter Prakash Ra­mad­har says there must be eq­ui­ty and fair­ness in the tax sys­tem. Ra­mad­har was com­ment­ing on Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an's tax re­form pro­pos­al, dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the COP's San Fer­nan­do of­fice pri­or to a walk­a­bout along High Street yes­ter­day. He said they were look­ing for­ward to mod­ernising the tax struc­ture. Deputy po­lit­i­cal leader and Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Min­is­ter Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan said the Min­istry of Fi­nance was look­ing at ways to sim­pli­fy the tax sys­tem, in­clud­ing the use of elec­tron­ic pay­ments. "So that it be­comes con­ve­nient and it is not oner­ous," said Seep­er­sad-Bachan, the San Fer­nan­do West MP.

Ques­tioned about the trade union's op­po­si­tion of the har­mon­i­sa­tion of oc­cu­pa­tion­al and NIS pen­sion, she said they were al­ways open to di­a­logue with the unions, and that the in­ter-min­is­te­r­i­al team that meets with all the trade unions af­fect­ed by cur­rent ne­go­ti­a­tions have fin­ished round one of ne­go­ti­a­tions. "We are cur­rent­ly mov­ing for­ward for the next round of ne­go­ti­a­tions, but be­fore we do so we are host­ing a work­shop on the new so­cial di­a­logue. We recog­nise what has ob­tained in the past can­not con­tin­ue and there­fore is­sues such as this, when deal­ing with har­mon­i­sa­tion, will be ful­ly ven­ti­lat­ed at those work­shops."

Ra­mad­har said the COP, one of five par­ties that forms the Peo­ple Part­ner­ship (PP) Gov­ern­ment, has not yet re­ceived a re­sponse to their call for the PP to meet to re­view the Fyz­abad Ac­cord. "We ea­ger­ly await that date, it is crit­i­cal­ly im­por­tant as we talk about the tax is­sue."