Chester Sam­bra­no

Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

chester.sam­bra­no@guardian.co.tt

Econ­o­mist and for­mer min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, Mar­i­ano Browne, has cau­tioned against any move to al­low the whole­sale ex­change of old $100 ban­knotes, say­ing such a de­ci­sion would raise se­ri­ous ques­tions about un­ex­plained wealth and cor­rup­tion.

The sug­ges­tion came from for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan af­ter the court, last Fri­day, or­dered the State to pay more than $40,000 in com­pen­sa­tion to the es­tate of an el­der­ly woman, who was de­nied the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­change old cot­ton $100 notes for poly­mer notes in 2020, af­ter she be­came strand­ed abroad dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

High Court Judge Devin­dra Ram­per­sad award­ed the com­pen­sa­tion af­ter up­hold­ing a law­suit brought by Shantee Nanan over the re­fusal of for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert to grant her an ex­ten­sion to ex­change $10,000 in old ban­knotes based on her ex­ten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, Browne said he did not ex­pect the is­sue to be raised dur­ing the Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view yes­ter­day, but ac­knowl­edged the pro­pos­al could ap­peal to many peo­ple.

“It does rep­re­sent a pos­si­bil­i­ty which would be at­trac­tive to many,” he said.

How­ev­er, Browne ar­gued that any dis­cus­sion about re­open­ing the ex­change process must be ac­com­pa­nied by stronger scruti­ny of the source of funds be­ing pre­sent­ed for con­ver­sion.

“The re­al is­sue that fol­lows from that is the un­ex­plained wealth bill. That’s go­ing to be the crit­i­cal is­sue. Where did you get it and how did you get it?” he said.

Browne not­ed, how­ev­er, that Ram­lo­gan’s ar­gu­ment ap­peared to fo­cus on ex­cep­tion­al cas­es, such as in­di­vid­u­als who were un­able to ex­change their notes while strand­ed abroad dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

“I think the is­sue he ar­gued for was a par­tic­u­lar per­son, some­body who was de­prived of an op­por­tu­ni­ty be­cause they were abroad and COVID got them stuck. Now, those are ex­cep­tion­al cir­cum­stances,” Browne said.

He warned that open­ing the door to a broad re­demp­tion pro­gramme for old notes would re­vive con­cerns that emerged dur­ing the de­mon­eti­sa­tion process, par­tic­u­lar­ly in cas­es in­volv­ing large sums of cash whose ori­gins were un­clear.

“To open the door to a whole­sale re­demp­tion of old notes al­so rais­es a whole se­ries of ques­tions which were nev­er well han­dled in the sit­u­a­tion where one or two per­sons showed up with sub­stan­tial amounts of un­ex­plained wealth,” he said.

He au­thor­i­ties had not ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed those con­cerns.

“We’ve had no re­al ac­tion on that,” he said, main­tain­ing that any ef­fort to com­bat cor­rup­tion must be con­sis­tent with mea­sures de­signed to pre­vent il­lic­it funds from en­ter­ing the fi­nan­cial sys­tem.

“It’s im­pos­si­ble to talk about cor­rup­tion on one side and then open this sort of ben­e­fi­cial hole and win­dow with­out re­al­ly deal­ing with those mat­ters,” Browne said.

He said it re­mained un­clear how pol­i­cy­mak­ers would ap­proach the is­sue go­ing for­ward.