Renu­ka Singh

The Port of Port-of-Spain has agreed to waive all port rent charges for the pe­ri­od Mon­day, March 30 to Wednes­day, April 15.

This new de­vel­op­ment comes af­ter on­go­ing dis­cus­sions be­tween the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce and the Gov­ern­ment with re­spect to waivers of port rent charges and de­mur­rage.

This new waiv­er is ex­pect­ed to help ad­dress the is­sues which af­fect the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, in light of the new Gov­ern­ment-im­posed re­stric­tions.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, T&T Cham­ber chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Gabriel Faria con­firmed the waiv­er.

He said that charges ac­crued pri­or to Mon­day, March 30, re­main ap­plic­a­ble.

The cham­ber has al­so been in dis­cus­sions with the port in Point Lisas.

“We await feed­back from the port of Point Lisas,” Faria said.

“The is­sue of de­mur­rage still re­mains a cru­cial point of dis­cus­sion and we ask the gov­ern­ment to use their of­fice to per­suade the ship­ping com­pa­nies to fol­low suit and waive de­mur­rage for all non-es­sen­tial com­pa­nies dur­ing this pe­ri­od of re­strict­ed move­ment un­der these force ma­jeure cir­cum­stances,” Faria said.

He said that the fi­nan­cial im­pli­ca­tions are sig­nif­i­cant if these waivers were not grant­ed.

The cham­ber is al­so call­ing on cit­i­zens to obey the new reg­u­la­tions im­posed by the Gov­ern­ment and stay at home.

Faria said the body “strong­ly sup­ports the ini­tia­tives of gov­ern­ment to re­strict un­nec­es­sary move­ment at this time”.

“We ask our busi­ness­es and na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to stay at home un­less ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary,” Faria said.

When the Gov­ern­ment first an­nounced the new re­stric­tions on non-es­sen­tial busi­ness­es last Thurs­day, Faria and oth­er busi­ness cham­bers said the State’s call caused pan­ic.

At that time, Faria said that the lack of de­tails on what busi­ness­es were es­sen­tial meant con­fu­sion for busi­ness own­ers.

How­ev­er, now that the State has clar­i­fied the list of es­sen­tial and non-es­sen­tial busi­ness­es, the cham­ber is call­ing for cit­i­zen sup­port of the lock down.

Faria said as a small coun­try, the risk can be detri­men­tal if cit­i­zens do not ad­here to the stay-at-home rules.

“It is a time for us to be pru­dent, heed the in­struc­tions of gov­ern­ment and work to­geth­er to bring the sit­u­a­tion un­der con­trol,” he said.