Put to rest the ‘ole talk’ that the Po­lice Ser­vice was “un­der­fund­ed.”

With that view, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert yes­ter­day point­ed out the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice which got $300 mil­lion in the 2021 Bud­get got an ad­di­tion­al $57 mil­lion in the Sup­ple­men­ta­tion and Vari­a­tion bill passed in Par­lia­ment.

Plus there was a $200 mil­lion loan to pay off pre­vi­ous bills. In to­tal the TTPS will re­ceive al­most $600m in 2021.

The ex­tra $57m fund­ing will deal with TTPS goods and sup­plies in­clud­ing ser­vice providers, ve­hi­cle rental, equip­ment and weapons.

Im­bert not­ed if all goes to plan, the TTPS would have—af­ter clear­ing all li­a­bil­i­ties—al­most $400m for goods and ser­vices for 2021.

“So I want to put to rest the ole talk on ‘un­der­fund­ing’ of TTPS—that’s non­sense!”

Sup­ple­men­ta­tion is al­so re­quest­ed for WASA which costs $ 2 bil­lion plus an­nu­al­ly. Im­bert said he hoped Gov­ern­ment would have been fur­ther along in re­duc­ing WASA’s de­pen­dence on tax­pay­ers, “But for var­i­ous rea­sons, we’re not there yet, but very hope­ful we’ll get there.”

He didn’t give the rea­sons and didn’t say when “we’ll” get there.

Sup­ple­men­ta­tion was al­so need­ed for the Min­istry of Works’ out­stand­ing mat­ters in­clud­ing TTEC oblig­a­tions. The Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment al­so re­ceived fund­ing for staff and oth­er pay­ments.

Im­bert said sup­ple­men­ta­tion was al­so need­ed as min­istries have statu­to­ry au­thor­i­ties and land­lords to pay as well as con­trac­tors for projects com­plet­ed.

Im­bert dis­missed calls to go to the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund and to have struc­tur­al ad­just­ment. He said coun­tries on­ly ap­proach the IMF when they run out of for­eign ex­change and can’t ser­vice for­eign debt. “That’s eco­nom­ics 101,” he said.

He said Trinidad and To­ba­go’s re­serves are still US$7 bil­lion with US$5.7 bil­lion “more or less” in the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund. There’s more than suf­fi­cient for­eign ex­change at this point, “So there’s ab­solute­ly no rea­son to go to the IMF for help.”

Im­bert said the gov­ern­ment asked the IMF a month ago to help with fis­cal and mon­e­tary mat­ters.

He added the gov­ern­ment is al­so un­able to stop bor­row­ing cur­rent­ly as it would be un­able to pay for var­i­ous things and al­so said there no con­di­tion­al­i­ties at­tached to the US$200 mil­lion Chi­na loan.