Gail Alexan­der

Caribbean Air­lines Ltd (CAL) tick­et prices have al­ready gone up as De­cem­ber flights to Toron­to, Cana­da, are priced at $9,000 and those to Ft Laud­erdale, Flori­da, and New York are $5,000 and $6,000 re­spec­tive­ly, says PNM MP Colm Im­bert.Im­bert said so dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to yes­ter­day's bud­get de­bate dur­ing the sit­ting of the Low­er House, Tow­er D, Wa­ter­front Cen­tre, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.He said those were the CAL prices if one bought the tick­et now.Checks on the CAL Web site yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, show that the prices quot­ed by Im­bert were for the busi­ness class for the first two weeks in De­cem­ber.

Prices for the econ­o­my class for the same pe­ri­od av­er­aged: Toron­to $4,500, Ft Laud­erdale $3,500 and New York $5,400.Im­bert al­so said Gov­ern­ment had been "cre­ative" with ac­count­ing.

"This whole bud­get is a farce... It's all smoke and mir­rors but that won't work," he added.He said while the bud­get re­moved CAL's fu­el sub­sidy for in­ter­na­tion­al flights, bud­get doc­u­ments showed Gov­ern­ment had still giv­en CAL $400 mil­lion in trans­fers.Im­bert said CAL had, there­fore, re­ceived sim­i­lar fund­ing of $726 mil­lion in 2012 and $527 mil­lion in 2013.Al­to­geth­er, he added, CAL had re­ceived al­most $2 bil­lion in back­ing from Gov­ern­ment in re­cent years."Yet the min­is­ter has the au­dac­i­ty to say they are re­mov­ing the fu­el sub­sidy and they have been as­sured tick­et prices won't change," Im­bert added.

Cit­ing the prices of tick­ets to Cana­da and US cities which, he said, in­di­cat­ed prices had al­ready in­creased, Im­bert added: "Who you try­ing to fool?"Im­bert al­so called on the Fi­nance Min­is­ter as Cor­po­ra­tion Sole to say which min­is­ter trig­gered Sec­tion 51 of the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) Act in re­la­tion to PTSC deputy gen­er­al man­ag­er Ish­war Jadoo­nanan.

Not­ing the act states salaries over $9,600 must be ap­proved by the min­is­ter, Im­bert list­ed Jadoo­nanan's re­mu­ner­a­tion as in­clud­ing al­most $60,000 in salary, which, he said, the PTSC of­fi­cial re­ceived de­spite lack­ing a first de­gree.Read­ing from press re­ports, Im­bert said Jadoo­nanan was fired from the Air­port Au­thor­i­ty in 2002 for fail­ing to meet cri­te­ria, in­clud­ing lack­ing a de­gree.

Now, 11 years lat­er, Im­bert said, Jadoo­nanan, still with­out a de­gree, had nabbed a top PTSC pack­age.

Read­ing from the Nat­ur­al Gas Dai­ly, Im­bert al­so said Gov­ern­ment's agree­ment last week with Venezuela on the Lo­ran Man­a­tee gas field would see Venezuela ben­e­fit­ing, since the gas would be piped from T&T and sold in Venezuela."Be­tray­al!" Im­bert said."Trea­son!" PNM leader Kei­th Row­ley added.Im­bert said the pub­li­ca­tion al­so re­port­ed Venezuela's state-owned PDVSA and Chevron would be­gin work on the field and Venezuela planned to build a 276-km pipeline from the Lo­ran-Man­a­tee field to Guiria on that coun­try's east coast.Call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to say why it re­mained silent on the agree­ment, Im­bert said while Venezue­lans were cel­e­brat­ing the boon of the agree­ment where their coun­try was con­cerned, he ques­tioned T&T's ben­e­fit, as it would have been cheap­er to base the project in T&T.Im­bert said de­spite Gov­ern­ment's claims about a drainage plan, "not an inch of drain was laid in Port-of-Spain." Dis­play­ing pho­tographs of last week's Diego Mar­tin floods, Im­bert said drains were not cleaned and ques­tioned the mon­ey paid out to con­trac­tors for that.