Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

New­ly sworn-in Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo has con­firmed that no prop­er­ty tax will be in­tro­duced and says any­one who paid the fees will be re­fund­ed.

Speak­ing with re­porters af­ter a swear­ing-in cer­e­mo­ny at Pres­i­dent’s House, Queen’s Park East, yes­ter­day, Tan­coo said it would be “in­ap­pro­pri­ate” to pe­nalise peo­ple who have al­ready paid fees for prop­er­ty tax.

“I think it’s log­i­cal that those per­sons would have to be re­fund­ed.”

Tan­coo said that one of his first pri­or­i­ties as min­is­ter would be to re­view the cur­rent state of na­tion­al rev­enue and ex­pen­di­ture to as­sess what could be done to im­prove the econ­o­my.

Re­spond­ing to con­cerns over the abil­i­ty of the new­ly-formed Gov­ern­ment to keep the promis­es made while they were cam­paign­ing, Tan­coo said he did not see any chal­lenges in de­liv­er­ing what they out­lined.

“I as­sure you that the promis­es made on the bat­tle­field dur­ing the cam­paign will be kept.

“I think the chal­lenge may be how soon we can keep them, but we main­tain our com­mit­ments will be kept; this again on our as­sess­ment of the lev­el of ex­pen­di­ture and rev­enue that we have.

“I can pre­dict that we will be hav­ing a mid-year re­view most like­ly by the end of June, which we will pro­vide to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty: a full break­down of the sta­tus of the rev­enue and ex­pen­di­ture of our coun­try go­ing for­ward.”

Tan­coo said he was pleased with the ap­point­ments made by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and was con­fi­dent it would achieve their man­date of na­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion.