The Trinidad and To­ba­go Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion is call­ing for trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty con­cern­ing the reg­is­tra­tion of new for­eign-used car deal­ers and the re­cent in­crease in the quo­ta of ve­hi­cles which could be im­port­ed in­to T&T. In an in­ter­view at the T&T?Guardian's Port-of-Spain of­fice, pres­i­dent of the as­so­ci­a­tion Visham Bab­wah said: "We have been lob­by­ing to have an in­creased quo­ta for our small­er deal­ers which is cur­rent­ly be­tween ten an d 30 cars per year...It is not enough to sus­tain their busi­ness."

Bab­wah said the Min­istry of Trade, In­dus­try and In­vest­ment had said an au­dit was be­ing un­der­tak­en un­til the end of the year. "This is when they will have a true fig­ure avail­able for us and the au­dit will de­ter­mine who is in or out of all the deal­ers," he said. "The to­tal ve­hi­cles which we can im­port are 13,500 per cal­en­dar year...We can­not go be­yond that," he said.

Bab­wah, how­ev­er, said in­ves­ti­ga­tions by the used-car deal­ers re­vealed that dur­ing the time of the au­dit, sev­er­al ap­pli­ca­tions for new deal­ers were re­ceived. He said the reg­is­tra­tion of new deal­ers was closed off in 2008 and no one else could ap­ply. "We were told they were not reg­is­ter­ing new deal­ers and it stopped. There were no warn­ings to any of the deal­ers or mes­sages in the press that we were giv­en an ad­di­tion­al quo­ta," he said.

Bab­wah said the as­so­ci­a­tion then at­tempt­ed to get clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the sit­u­a­tion by ar­rang­ing to meet with line min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath. "We had three meet­ings arranged and all were can­celled at the last minute. We are now be­ing told that we are not sure when we will be able to see him since he is busy," he said. "You can't se­lect a few peo­ple and give them un­der­hand. It is deemed they were is­sued un­fair­ly and the Prime Min­is­ter must re­voke the li­cences is­sued be­cause she is the head of the Gov­ern­ment," he said.

Vice-pres­i­dent of the as­so­ci­a­tion Rhon­dall Fee­les said there are many ques­tions that have been left unan­swered by the min­istry. "We need to find out if the quo­tas were in­creased or is­sued to the new deal­ers. We don't want the in­ter­na­tion­al quo­ta in­creased from the 13,500 ve­hi­cles. We are ask­ing for an in­di­vid­ual quo­ta to be in­creased. The in­crease comes from the in­ac­tive users with­in the 13,500 quo­ta. We had an arrange­ment with Min­is­ter Steven Cadiz where it would be giv­en from those in­ac­tive deal­ers to ac­tive deal­ers," he said.

"Was it from the in­ac­tive deal­ers quo­tas, or was it for an ad­di­tion­al quo­ta? We need to know these an­swers. At the end of the day, it should not is­sued be­fore the au­dit was com­plet­ed." Bharath could not be reached for com­ment yes­ter­day.