Leah So­rias

Pres­i­dent of the Pre-owned Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion In­shan Ish­mael last Fri­day threat­ened to "buss out" of the car deal­ing in­dus­try if Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Jack Warn­er did not stop the im­por­ta­tion of "knock-down" and oth­er il­le­gal ve­hi­cles. In a dra­mat­ic move dur­ing a press brief­ing at the min­istry's ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fice, Port-of-Spain, Ish­mael said he was fed up of beg­ging for prob­lems with­in the in­dus­try to be ad­dressed.

"The longer you wait to deal with the cor­rup­tion, doc­u­ments will dis­ap­pear, the whole build­ing (Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion) might dis­ap­pear," he said. He said out of the 400 car deal­ers in T&T, some 200 had "closed their doors" be­cause their busi­ness­es were hurt by the sale of il­le­gal ve­hi­cles. "If you wait any longer to deal with this sit­u­a­tion, deal­ers will be on the bread­line," he told Warn­er.

Min­utes be­fore, Warn­er had an­nounced his plans to crack down on the cor­rup­tion with the di­vi­sion. He said he had writ­ten a let­ter to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan ask­ing him launch a foren­sic au­dit in­to the op­er­a­tions at the di­vi­sion. Warn­er al­so called on the AG to send of­fi­cers of the An­ti-Cor­rup­tion Bu­reau of the Po­lice Ser­vice in­to the di­vi­sion and in­ves­ti­gate the nu­mer­ous com­plaints sent to him.