PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

The Ex­im­bank’s fail­ure to achieve its full man­date may have con­tributed to the dis­missal of Navin Dook­er­an as Ex­port Im­port Bank of T&T Ltd (Ex­im­bank) CEO.

Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter and Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Dr Kennedy Swarats­ingh said the de­ci­sion was ul­ti­mate­ly up to the board, and he had lit­tle knowl­edge con­cern­ing the de­ci­sion to re­move Dook­er­an last Fri­day.

“What I can tell you is that the Ex­im­bank is in need of re­vamp­ing. Be­cause, as you know, the for­mer gov­ern­ment used the Ex­im­bank for a num­ber of things, in­clud­ing in­creas­ing the cat­e­gories of things that can be used or ac­cessed through the Ex­im­bank. So dur­ing COVID, they would have put in an es­sen­tial cat­e­go­ry that they would have kept on even af­ter COVID. So Ex­im­bank was in need of up­dat­ing and has to be up­dat­ed,” said Swarats­ingh when asked about Dook­er­an’s re­moval out­side Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day.

“So I’m not so sure whether re­struc­tur­ing was part of it, but the Ex­im­bank was ear­marked for some in­ter­ven­tion,” the min­is­ter said, adding, “I pre­sume that is part of that. And of course, we have a few more things to do to make sure. Be­cause as you know, the Ex­im­bank was de­signed not as a con­tin­u­ous fund­ing for dif­fer­ent or­gan­i­sa­tions, but you were sup­posed to ac­cess it and repa­tri­ate funds back in­to the coun­try and so on. So I’m not so sure that the Ex­im­bank had ful­filled (its man­date), they had on­ly ful­filled part of the man­date and so we need to make sure that we ful­fil all of this man­date.”

Swarats­ingh ex­plained that the bank’s man­date was not just re­lat­ed to the lend­ing of forex to com­pa­nies, but al­so en­sur­ing that there would be re­newed cir­cu­la­tion of for­eign ex­change in the coun­try. This, he said, failed to ma­te­ri­alise.

He added, “Well, the board of the Ex­im would have to re­view that and that’s a de­ci­sion for the board to do. And when we ap­point boards, we al­low them to make those kinds of in­ter­ven­tions. What I can say is that the Ex­im­bank in very many ways need­ed to be ur­gent­ly re­viewed. And in some ways an in­ter­ven­tion was re­quired.”

Dook­er­an’s dis­missal has prompt­ed mixed views from the busi­ness sec­tor, but with re­newed hope that there will be greater eq­ui­ty in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of for­eign ex­change for small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es.