A new de­bate is brew­ing over the use of the funds in T&T’s Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund, af­ter Op­po­si­tion Leader, Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar on Fri­day took is­sue with com­ments made by econ­o­mist Dr Ronald Ramkissoon.

On Fri­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar post­ed a let­ter to the ed­i­tor on Face­book in which she quot­ed Ramkissoon in the last Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian, as say­ing “What has been the ten­den­cy over suc­ces­sive years and gov­ern­ments is, in fact, to meet the short­fall by bor­row­ing and or draw­ing on Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF) or sav­ings.”

The ar­ti­cle, which was writ­ten by Guardian Me­dia Ltd’s se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter, An­drea Perez-Sobers, was head­lined, “Pub­lic ser­vants want bet­ter set­tle­ment in bud­get.”

In the ar­ti­cle, Ramkissoon made the gen­er­al point that T&T is an en­er­gy-based econ­o­my, which ex­pe­ri­ences ex­cel­lent times and then some ter­ri­ble times. Man­ag­ing the booms and the dol­drums has been chal­leng­ing, with min­is­ters of fi­nance opt­ing to fi­nance fis­cal deficits by ei­ther bor­row­ing or draw­ing on the HSF.

In re­spond­ing to Ramkissoon’s com­ment, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said if Ramkissoon meant to in­clude the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) in his claim, then this was disin­gen­u­ous.

She then stat­ed that be­fore 2016, no ad­min­is­tra­tion had made a sin­gle with­draw­al from the HSF. The Op­po­si­tion Leader point­ed out that be­tween Sep­tem­ber 2016 and De­cem­ber 2023, the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion made ten with­drawals to­talling US$2.66 bil­lion.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said, “The Gov­ern­ment that I led, on the oth­er hand, de­posit­ed a to­tal of over US$1.17 bil­lion in the HSF over 5 years. The records could not be more dif­fer­ent. They, in fact, are po­lar op­po­sites,” adding that meet­ing rev­enue short­falls by draw­ing on the HSF “is on­ly char­ac­ter­is­tic of the Row­ley PNM Gov­ern­ment, and no oth­er.”

She said the HSF was orig­i­nal­ly es­tab­lished in 2000 by the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC)-led Gov­ern­ment, and called the In­ter­im Rev­enue Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund.

Ac­cord­ing to Per­sad-Bisses­sar, the UNC un­der­stands that the HSF is meant to build the fu­ture of T&T, in par­tic­u­lar, its ca­pac­i­ty to gen­er­ate fur­ther wealth.

“On the oth­er hand, the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) has used the HSF for fund­ing day-to-day run­ning costs, not for gen­er­at­ing new wealth. In fact, in March 2020, the PNM amend­ed the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund Act to pro­vide the gov­ern­ment with new grounds for mak­ing with­drawals,” she said.

She clar­i­fied the two ad­min­is­tra­tions record on bor­row­ing.

She said from 2010 to 2015, her ad­min­is­tra­tion bor­rowed a to­tal of $18.1 bil­lion. But from 2015 to 2023, the ad­min­is­tra­tion led by Dr Kei­th Row­ley “bor­rowed a mind-bog­gling $89.2 bil­lion,” which was un­like any oth­er gov­ern­ment pre­vi­ous­ly as it was “an his­tor­i­cal­ly stag­ger­ing amount. To equate the two lev­els of bor­row­ing, as Dr Ramkissoon ap­pears to do, is un­rea­son­able, to put it mild­ly.”

In a re­sponse on a What­sApp group, which she gave Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian per­mis­sion to pub­lish, King, who is an eco­nom­ic com­men­ta­tor, said that Per­sad-Bisses­sar ig­nored two things.

“The first is that the HSF is a dual-pur­pose fund, sta­bil­i­sa­tion and her­itage. Kam­la seems to think it is on­ly for the lat­ter and not the for­mer when the rents are in­suf­fi­cient to run the econ­o­my.

“Her sec­ond omis­sion is to ig­nore that the draw­down from/in­put to the HSF de­pends on how the en­er­gy sec­tor is per­form­ing and the ex­pec­ta­tion of the gov­ern­ment on this.”

King said that at present the en­er­gy sec­tor is per­form­ing very bad­ly “and in or­der to main­tain the on­shore econ­o­my, gov­ern­ment is bor­row­ing, run­ning down its re­serves and some draw­down from the HSF.”

“The pe­tro­le­um plan­ta­tion to­day is in a very poor state com­pared with when the UNC was at the helm of gov­ern­ment when putting mon­ey in­to the HSF sug­gests that the rents were high,” said King, who served as a min­is­ter in the 2010 to 2015 Peo­ple’s Parn­er­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to the quar­ter­ly re­port of the HSF for the pe­ri­od end­ing March 31, 2024, “As at the end of March 2024, the to­tal net as­set val­ue of the HSF was US$5,898.0 mil­lion.” The net as­set val­ue of the HSF as at Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015 was US$5.65 bil­lion.

The gen­er­al elec­tion in T&T in 2015 was on Sep­tem­ber 7, with the PNM emerg­ing vic­to­ri­ous with 23 of the 41 con­stituen­cies.