PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Five bil­lion dol­lars and count­ing.

That’s the con­firmed amount spent in re­sponse to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert.

“We have crossed the $5 bil­lion mark and we in­tend to pro­vide as much re­lief as we can. And cer­tain­ly, in the next bud­get, there will be an amount for COVID re­lief, resid­ual COVID re­lief go­ing for­ward in­to 2022,” Im­bert said dur­ing a vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day,

About $75 mil­lion out of that sum has been spent so far to pro­cure vac­cines, Im­bert said as he dis­missed ru­mours that the Gov­ern­ment had sought loans to buy dos­es.

“All of the vac­cines that we have pur­chased so far, we have use of gen­er­al rev­enues be­cause of the im­por­tance of it. You didn’t wait for any­thing. So we have used gen­er­al rev­enues earned by the Min­istry of Fi­nance from tax­a­tion and wher­ev­er to pur­chase vac­cines,” said Im­bert, who pre­vi­ous­ly es­ti­mat­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go would spend $120-130 mil­lion on vac­cines.

“The ac­tu­al ex­pen­di­ture so far is still the same 70 to 75 mil­lion TT dol­lar range. We have quite a lot of do­na­tions as you know ... the As­traZeneca from Cana­da was a do­na­tion. You have not yet been called up­on by the Africa vac­cine Al­liance Trust to pay for the John­son & John­son vac­cine, ex­cept for the first batch that is on the way,” Im­bert said, while stress­ing he still ex­pect­ed mon­ey spent on vac­cines to reach his pro­ject­ed es­ti­mate.

He al­so con­firmed $150 mil­lion has been paid out via the Salary Re­lief Grant since 2020.

Im­bert said $147.8 mil­lion had been paid out to 91,393 ap­pli­cants from 2020.

“We al­so have a num­ber of cards which we gave to per­sons who don’t have bank ac­counts and the num­ber of cards that we have pro­duced so far is 6,367. Of which, over 3,000 al­ready been de­liv­ered and an­oth­er 2,000 out for de­liv­ery. So that’s the 2020 sit­u­a­tion,” the Fi­nance Min­is­ter said.

Since the re­lief grant was restart­ed in May 2021, he con­firmed about $12 mil­lion had been paid out to over 4,000 ap­pli­cants.

“As of the Au­gust 16, 4,070 per­sons have re­ceived salary grants for a to­tal, pay­out of about $12 mil­lion. In terms of ap­pli­ca­tions, we have screened 14,747 ap­pli­ca­tions. The to­tal ap­pli­ca­tion sub­mit­ted was 24,000, we have screened al­most 15,000 of those,” he said.

He al­so con­firmed that there were 774 ap­pli­ca­tions in To­ba­go which are be­ing processed.

Im­bert con­firmed that the vast ma­jor­i­ty of ap­pli­cants had come from the food ser­vices and re­tail sec­tors.

Restau­rants were closed at the end of April, while re­tails stores were or­dered closed a week lat­er amidst a rapid in­crease in COVID-19 cas­es in the coun­try.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter con­firmed that re­tail work­ers were the most com­mon ap­pli­cants, with 9,003 ap­pli­ca­tions com­ing from that sec­tor, while 8,006 from the food/restau­rant and ser­vice in­dus­try ap­plied for re­lief.

The next most fre­quent ap­pli­ca­tion for the grant came from work­ers at­tached to mem­bers’ clubs and casi­nos, with 1,109 ap­pli­ca­tions.

Im­bert said hair dressers and bar­bers were al­so seek­ing aid in sig­nif­i­cant num­ber, as well as sport­ing fa­cil­i­ty em­ploy­ees.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter al­so dan­nounce changes to the Small and Medi­um En­ter­prise (SME) gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee loan pro­gramme, which went large­ly un­used as many ap­pli­cants failed to meet the re­quired cri­te­ria to ac­cess the loan.

“The banks recog­nised that sev­er­al ap­pli­cants were hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty in mov­ing from the ap­pli­ca­tion stage to the dis­burse­ment stage of the loan pro­gramme. The biggest prob­lem was with the area of statu­to­ry re­quire­ments. Forty-sev­en per cent of the per­sons who were turned down for one of these SMEs loans were un­able to pro­vide ev­i­dence of up-to-date VAT pay­ments,” said Im­bert, who con­firmed that ad­just­ments were made so that ap­pli­cants could pro­vide doc­u­ments from 2018 in widen­ing the avail­abil­i­ty.

He al­so con­firmed that the Gov­ern­ment would now guar­an­tee 100 per cent of the loan, as op­posed to 75 per­cent guar­an­tee, while al­so ad­just­ing the min­i­mum thresh­old re­quired for the loan.

“I’m go­ing to take it back to the year and 2018 so that the ap­pli­cants will now. They must show that they are up to date with tax­es and NIS pay­ments up to 2018 and will be giv­en one year af­ter they get the loan to bring them­selves ful­ly up to date,” Im­bert said.

“We are al­so chang­ing the thresh­old. So that we’re low­er­ing the thresh­old for ac­cess to the fa­cil­i­ty to $500,000 an­nu­al turnover, which isn’t much for a small busi­ness, but we thought that that’s the thresh­olds for Val­ue-Added Tax reg­is­tra­tion, $500,000.”

Im­bert con­firmed that the loan, which had pre­vi­ous­ly been meant to cov­er op­er­a­tional ex­pens­es and salary pay­ments, could al­so now be used for fixed as­set and plant and ma­chin­ery as well.

The min­is­ter con­firmed that 272 busi­ness­es suc­cess­ful­ly ap­plied for the loans but said in ex­cess of 300 ap­pli­ca­tions were re­ceived.