Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo met with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca (CAF) in an in­tro­duc­to­ry meet­ing on Mon­day.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the min­istry, the meet­ing was held to dis­cuss some of the on­go­ing ini­tia­tives CAF had be­gun with the gov­ern­ment pre­vi­ous­ly as well as for­mal­ly high­light the bank’s role as T&T’s prin­ci­pal mul­ti­lat­er­al de­vel­op­ment part­ner.

At the meet­ing, which took place at the Min­istry of Fi­nance head of­fice, Er­ic Williams Fi­nance Build­ing, Por-of-Spain, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of CAF em­pha­sised that over the past 30 years, CAF and the T&T Gov­ern­ment have de­vel­oped a strong and en­dur­ing part­ner­ship.

It was not­ed that CAF col­lab­o­rat­ed di­rect­ly with the Min­istry of Fi­nance as the of­fi­cial fo­cal point for the coun­try’s en­gage­ment in­clud­ing loan fi­nanc­ing and tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance sup­port on a range of is­sues such as flood mit­i­ga­tion, cor­po­rate gov­er­nance for state-owned en­ti­ties, dig­i­tal pay­ments and e-iden­ti­ty and pub­lic pro­cure­ment.

The min­istry al­so con­firmed that, “Dur­ing the meet­ing, the De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca al­so took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­vise the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance that Trinidad and To­ba­go as­sumed the chair­man­ship of CAF’s Board of Di­rec­tors for a one-year term dur­ing the CLXXXIV Meet­ing of the Board of Di­rec­tors held on March 27 in San­ti­a­go, Chile.”

Most re­cent­ly CAF had helped fa­cil­i­tate the im­ple­men­ta­tion of LACIF Grant Agree­ment, which af­ford­ed the gov­ern­ment ac­cess to €3 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty from CAF and the Eu­ro­pean Union for the im­ple­men­ta­tion of T&T’s in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty plat­form, e-iden­ti­ty pro­gramme and gov­ern­ment da­ta plat­form. That deal was signed in Feb­ru­ary.

At that cer­e­mo­ny, for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert con­firmed that T&T’s Fi­nance Min­is­ter would chair CAF for the year.