A to­tal of US$345 mil­lion has been de­posit­ed in­to the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF) this year, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert stat­ed yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, this pales in com­par­i­son to the US$900 mil­lion which was with­drawn last fis­cal year, Op­po­si­tion Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment Roodal Mooni­lal has said.

In a post to his Twit­ter page yes­ter­day Im­bert stat­ed:

“On Fri­day, De­cem­ber 23, 2022, we de­posit­ed US$182 mil­lion (TT$1.23 bil­lion) in­to our Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF), pre­serv­ing wealth for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions in T&T. This makes a to­tal of US$345 mil­lion (TT$2.35 bil­lion) de­posit­ed in­to the HSF in 2022.”

Ques­tioned by the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ Prof Shirin Haque on where the funds came from to make the de­posit, Im­bert re­spond­ed, “High­er than es­ti­mat­ed rev­enues from pe­tro­le­um.”

Ac­cord­ing to the lat­est HSF quar­ter­ly in­vest­ment re­port post­ed to the Fi­nance Min­istry’s web­site at the end of June 2022, the to­tal net as­set val­ue of the HSF was US$4.77 bil­lion.

This was ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$528 mil­lion low­er than the pre­vi­ous quar­ter’s clos­ing val­ue of US$5.299 bil­lion.

There were with­drawals from the HSF every quar­ter from De­cem­ber 31, 2020 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2021 in the amount of $198.9 mil­lion, $293.77 mil­lion, $300 mil­lion and $100 mil­lion, re­spec­tive­ly.

Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence held by the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress yes­ter­day, the head ta­ble was asked for a re­sponse to the state­ment made by Im­bert about the HSF de­posits.

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark said Im­bert was sim­ply fol­low­ing the law.

Mark said the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Act makes it clear that there is a for­mu­la with­in the leg­is­la­tion which states that once the price of crude oil ris­es above the bud­get­ed price there is a “time frame at which you have to ad­here to, to make that sum of mon­ey in ex­cess that you have bud­get­ed for and place that said sum in­to the HSF.”

Im­bert pegged the na­tion­al bud­get on an oil price of US$92.50 per bar­rel.

Mark said based on the cur­rent trend with the oil price be­ing be­low that mark, “what Min­is­ter Im­bert has done is tell us that there will be no mon­ey go­ing in­to the HSF next year.”

Mooni­lal said Im­bert is “seek­ing to boast about fol­low­ing the law.”

“He’s not do­ing any­thing spe­cial. This is not kind­ness, this is not a favour,” Mooni­lal said.

The HSF is de­nom­i­nat­ed in US dol­lars and its fis­cal year ends in Sep­tem­ber.

The Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Act, No. 6 of 2007 es­tab­lished the HSF with ef­fect from March 15, 2007.