Sascha Wil­son

South busi­ness­men say the coun­try's de­cline in the Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tion In­dex (CPI) is a clear in­di­ca­tion that more has to be done to ad­dress cor­rup­tion is­sues.Fig­ures re­leased by T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute on Tues­day showed T&T dropped from 80 to 83, ty­ing with Ja­maica and Guyana as the Caribbean's sixth-ranked na­tion.Com­ment­ing on the de­cline, Greater Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce pres­i­dent Richie Sookhai was he was not too wor­ried. He be­lieves it was as a re­sult of the hec­tic elec­tion year.

Sookhai, in a tele­phone in­ter­view on Tues­day said: "This is re­al­ly a per­ceived in­dex."From what I have seen, the Gov­ern­ment has shown that they are deal­ing with any al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion, for ex­am­ple the SNC-Lavalin is­sue."You have to un­der­stand that the in­dex will be high­er (be­cause) we had four elec­tions in a year. I will ex­pect ru­mours of cor­rup­tion. I am not sur­prised by that in­dex at all."He said it was not that the Gov­ern­ment was not deal­ing with cor­rup­tion but just that it had more work to do.

"There was al­so a sur­vey that said we are one of the hap­pi­est coun­tries in the world," he added. The Gov­ern­ment was forced to can­cel an arrange­ment with the Cana­di­an Com­mer­cial Cor­po­ra­tion, to al­low SNC-Lavalin, a dis­cred­it­ed Cana­di­an firm, to con­struct the $1 bil­lion Pe­nal hos­pi­tal.

San Fer­nan­do Busi­nes­sAs­so­ci­a­tion speaks

San Fer­nan­do Busi­ness As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Daphne Bartlett said per­cep­tion was greater than the truth.She said: "If the per­cep­tion is that there is more cor­rup­tion this year than the pre­vi­ous year, some­thing is mak­ing peo­ple feel that checks and bal­ances are not what they are sup­posed to be, for ex­am­ple, in re­cent times the is­sue with pur­chas­es of cars by se­nior gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials who are en­ti­tled to car al­lowances."

She said whether or not the al­le­ga­tions were true, the per­cep­tion was that the en­ti­tle­ment was be­ing abused.She al­so re­called that un­der the last regime, be­cause of the Calder Hart con­tro­ver­sy, the per­cep­tion of cor­rup­tion was very high.Al­though the per­cep­tion has im­proved since then, she said: "The var­i­ous au­thor­i­ties should be putting mea­sures in place to deal with that kind of per­cep­tion, whether it is true or not."

The Point Fortin/South West­ern Cham­ber pres­i­dent, Nigel Mi­nors, ex­pressed con­cern about the im­pact the rat­ing would have on in­ter­na­tion­al in­vest­ments. He said: "As busi­ness peo­ple our ma­jor con­cern is the lack of fur­ther in­ter­na­tion­al in­vest­ments."I am hop­ing that all the pow­ers that be that have all the where­with­al will do so with dis­patch so we will start to see an im­prove­ment in­stead of go­ing fur­ther down (the CPI)."

Based on his ex­pe­ri­ence on the in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness front, he said: "We se­ri­ous­ly need to get out of that per­cep­tion... it is not where we want to be for a num­ber of rea­sons."

Pe­nal/Debe Cham­ber

Pe­nal/Debe Cham­ber of Com­merce pres­i­dent Sahid Ho­sein was not sur­prised.He said: "That is hard­ly sur­pris­ing be­cause we have be­come a very cor­rupt so­ci­ety where peo­ple like to point fin­gers but we are miss­ing the im­por­tant point that re­gard­less of who they are, they come from so­ci­ety... they are a prod­uct and re­sult of so­ci­ety."We don't seem to un­der­stand by our at­ti­tude we are set­ting the seeds to de­stroy what we call T&T."

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, he said, the in­sti­tu­tions that dealt with cor­rup­tion were not up to the task be­cause of staff and re­source short­ages.Re­gard­less of which ad­min­is­tra­tion was in pow­er, he said, cor­rup­tion con­tin­ued to thrive.Peo­ple, he said, had to be­come se­ri­ous and de­mand ac­count­abil­i­ty.