Richard?Lord

It will be dif­fi­cult to run T&T on a bud­get­ed oil price of US$50, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said in re­sponse to a com­ment by Op­po­si­tion MP Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie dur­ing Fri­day's House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives de­bate on the Gam­bling (Gam­ing and Bet­ting) Con­trol Bill, 2016.

Tewarie had asked Im­bert if it was un­rea­son­able for T&T to man­age its busi­ness on the ba­sis of a US$50 oil price and a US$3 gas price.

The min­is­ter ex­plained that when gas is sold above US$50 a bar­rel T&T be­gins to re­ceive sup­ple­men­tal pe­tro­le­um tax (SPT). He said in a good year T&T can re­ceive as much as $4 bil­lon from SPT and the Board of In­land Rev­enue col­lect­ed $200 mil­lion in SPT last month, the first time in a very long time such amounts of the tax had been re­ceived. He said this was a clear in­di­ca­tion of how im­por­tant the tax and the US$50 thresh­old is for T&T.

Im­bert said pas­sage of the bill is crit­i­cal as the coun­try had al­ready been down­grad­ed by the Caribbean Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force for not reg­u­lat­ing its gam­bling and gam­ing in­dus­try. He said there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200 pri­vate mem­bers clubs op­er­at­ing casi­no style ac­tiv­i­ties and 200,000 amuse­ment gam­ing ma­chines op­er­at­ing in some 4,000 bars and recre­ation­al pubs across the coun­try.

Im­bert de­scribed the in­dus­try as "com­plete­ly un­reg­u­lat­ed and com­plete­ly out of con­trol and we need to do some­thing about it."

He said T&T is on an en­hanced com­pli­ance list due "in no small mea­sure to the fact that we have an un­reg­u­lat­ed $12 bil­lion gam­ing sec­tor in this coun­try."

The bill was re­ferred to a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee for de­lib­er­a­tions and to re­port to Par­lia­ment by March 17. Com­mit­tee mem­bers from the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives are Im­bert, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi, Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, La Brea MP Nicole Ol­li­v­ere and Op­po­si­tion MPs Gan­ga Singh and Rudranath In­dars­ingh. Sen­ate mem­bers have not yet been named.