GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

While the T&T Scrap Iron Deal­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTSI­DA) con­tin­ue to call for the clo­sure of all scrap­yards run by for­eign­ers, Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon said the deal­ers are the ones who brought in the for­eign­ers to T&T in the first place.

She made the com­ments while speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia at the un­veil­ing of Nu Wave Au­to­mo­tive 28,000-square-foot state-of-the-art fa­cil­i­ty in El So­cor­ro on Tues­day.

The TTSI­DA has ac­cused for­eign­ers, name­ly those from In­dia and Chi­na, of own­ing and run­ning scrap­yards across the coun­try.

The as­so­ci­a­tion al­so com­plained that these these for­eign op­er­a­tors are try­ing to force lo­cal deal­ers out of busi­ness to take over the in­dus­try.

Com­ment­ing on the is­sue, Gopee-Scoon said, "I un­der­stand this is about the sec­ond or third time the Scrap Iron Deal­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion have gone out there com­plain­ing about for­eign­ers do­ing busi­ness. But they are the very ones who brought those for­eign­ers in­to Trinidad to do the ex­port of their scrap.

"In oth­er words they are deal­ing with scrap, col­lect­ing scrap then pass­ing it on and sell­ing it on to these ex­porters so those ex­porters are al­so deal­ers in the reg­is­tered sense so they are not il­le­gal­ly here as well as lour lo­cal peo­ple are deal­ers....So I don't know how the scrap iron deal­ers ex­pect the min­istry to at­tend to the col­lec­tors who op­er­ate un­der the for­eign deal­ers and not at­tend to the col­lec­tors who op­er­ate un­der the lo­cal deal­ers. It has to be eq­ui­table"

The min­is­ter said the con­cerns may be cen­tred around the fact that these for­eign deal­ers have now gone in­to the realm of col­lect­ing scrap iron which is what the lo­cal deal­ers were pri­mar­i­ly do­ing.

To ad­dress this is­sue, she said her min­istry and the Gov­ern­ment have been try­ing to put an en­tire­ly le­gal, for­mal sys­tem in place for col­lec­tors and deal­ers.

"We have put past the pol­i­cy, we have passed the leg­is­la­tion and we have not been get­ting the deal­ers to get their col­lec­tors reg­is­tered. So it's free sea­son," Gopee-Scoon said.

Mean­while, dur­ing the launch Nu Wave Au­to­mo­tive Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor Michael Sealey said the fa­cil­i­ty is just an­oth­er step in the com­pa­ny's plan to ex­pand be­yond T&T par­tic­u­lar­ly amid for­eign ex­change con­cerns.

"While this has been a clear and present dan­ger for busi­ness­es like our­selves, we have no in­ten­tion to sit in the pavil­ion and ob­serve. There­fore we are al­so in talks to in­tro­duce our fran­chise mod­el, first­ly to St Lu­cia and then to St Vin­cent in the first in­stance," he said yes­ter­day.

Sealey al­so an­nounced plans to open a bat­tery as­sem­bly in Ghana hav­ing been part of a pre­vi­ous trade mis­sion to the African coun­try ear­li­er this year and al­so re­vealed de­tails con­cern­ing it part­ner­ship with Pe­ru­vian bat­tery brand En­er­jet

Sealey al­so not­ed while there has been an in­crease in the sale of hy­brid and elec­tric ve­hi­cle, lo­cal tech­ni­cians large­ly have lim­it­ed ex­po­sure in terms of re­pair­ing those ve­hi­cles.

This he plans to change with the new fa­cil­i­ty.

"We have start­ed con­ver­sa­tion with IMI, which is the In­sti­tute of Mo­tor in­dus­tries which is based in the UK, and this will be the first cer­ti­fied fa­cil­i­ty for the ser­vice and main­te­nance of hy­brid ve­hi­cles," he added.