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Friday, July 11, 2025

Imbert rubbishes UNC claims economy’s collapsing

by

Sampson Nanton
398 days ago
20240608
Finance Minister Colm Imbert delivers the motion to adopt the Standing Finance Committee report  in Parliament yesterday.

Finance Minister Colm Imbert delivers the motion to adopt the Standing Finance Committee report in Parliament yesterday.

SHIRLEY BAHADUR

Deputy Man­ag­ing Ed­i­tor

samp­son.nan­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has dis­missed claims by the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) that the econ­o­my will col­lapse and has as­sured the Gov­ern­ment will be pru­dent in its spend­ing.

He made the state­ment as he wrapped up de­bate on the Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives last night.

The Gov­ern­ment was seek­ing to ap­pro­pri­ate an ad­di­tion­al $2.3 bil­lion in ex­pen­di­ture to the $59.2 bil­lion al­lo­cat­ed in the na­tion­al Bud­get read in Sep­tem­ber last year.

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and oth­er Op­po­si­tion mem­bers had ear­li­er strong­ly crit­i­cised the re­quest while in­sist­ing that it re­flect­ed an atro­cious state of the econ­o­my.

How­ev­er, Im­bert de­scribed their views as in­flam­ma­to­ry and in­cor­rect.

“All I heard from the Leader of the Op­po­si­tion was a se­ries of in­flam­ma­to­ry re­marks that had no ba­sis what­so­ev­er, that have no sub­stance, that have no facts to back them up, that have no log­ic to back them up ... state­ments such as the coun­try is bank­rupt ... state­ments such as the econ­o­my has col­lapsed,” he said.

He added: “The ho­n­ourable Prime Min­is­ter made the point that we’ve been hear­ing that mantra since 2016. So ap­par­ent, every sin­gle year, the econ­o­my has col­lapsed, in ‘16, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, ‘22, ‘23 and now in ‘24.”

He told the House that he felt the need to re­as­sure the pub­lic that this was not the case, and read a me­dia re­lease is­sued by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) on June 5, that sug­gest­ed the econ­o­my was do­ing bet­ter than ex­pect­ed and would grow by 2.4 per cent in fis­cal 2024.

“They vex with the IMF,” he said.

He added that the Op­po­si­tion need­ed to un­der­stand what a sup­ple­men­ta­tion of ap­pro­pri­a­tion was, and he as­sured that the Gov­ern­ment would act re­spon­si­bly with the ex­tra $2.3 bil­lion it was re­quest­ing.

“Every year this ad­min­is­tra­tion, when it does its sup­ple­men­ta­tion, we are cog­nisant of rev­enue chal­lenges. We con­trol ex­pen­di­ture. If you look at the ac­tu­al out­turn at the end of the year, we nev­er use the en­tire sup­ple­men­ta­tion. We have to do the ap­pro­pri­a­tion so that the fis­cal space ex­ists, that if there is an emer­gency and the ex­pen­di­ture is in­escapable, that the ap­pro­pri­a­tion is there be­cause if you don’t have the ap­pro­pri­a­tion, you can­not make the ex­pen­di­ture. But we have al­ways come be­low the sup­ple­men­ta­tion,” Im­bert said.

He con­tin­ued: “I can tell you with­out any fear of con­tra­dic­tion, even though we have asked the Par­lia­ment to sup­ple­ment the orig­i­nal ap­pro­pri­a­tion by $2.3 bil­lion, tak­ing the to­tal ap­proved ap­pro­pri­a­tion to just over $61 bil­lion, I can tell you cer­tain­ly we are go­ing to pri­ori­tise and man­age ex­pen­di­ture, and we will cer­tain­ly not end up the year with a deficit of $9 bil­lion.”

Im­bert chal­lenged the Op­po­si­tion to ex­plain why it be­lieved that the econ­o­my had col­lapsed.

“Try and find space in the sa­van­nah for the reg­gae con­cert that took place last week and the one that is hap­pen­ing to­mor­row. Go and see if you could find space in­side there. Our na­tion’s roads are clogged with ve­hi­cles. Every car­ni­val fete was sold out this year. So how is it ... if the coun­try gone through, the econ­o­my col­lapse, peo­ple suf­fer­ing, how is it that all this ac­tiv­i­ty is tak­ing place?” he asked.

The min­is­ter told the House his Gov­ern­ment knows how to run the coun­try and has been able to do so with oil prices as low as US$25 per bar­rel.

In turn, he crit­i­cised the UNC’s eco­nom­ic man­age­ment from 2010 to 2015, dur­ing which time he not­ed it bor­rowed $31 bil­lion, “si­phoned” $14 bil­lion out of the Cen­tral Bank’s over­draft ac­count, and with­drew $17 bil­lion from the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny, even though it was ben­e­fit­ing from an av­er­age oil price of US$102 per bar­rel.

Im­bert al­so con­demned the Op­po­si­tion for what he said were ef­forts to get gas deal li­cences with Venezuela can­celled.

“Look at what they’re hop­ing for, that there will be a change of ad­min­is­tra­tion in the Unit­ed States and the new ad­min­is­tra­tion will kill and bury T&T. That is what they’re hop­ing for and they want to know why we call them un­pa­tri­ot­ic. In­stead of hop­ing that there’ll be a smooth tran­si­tion and the poli­cies would con­tin­ue no mat­ter who is the pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States and that the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the Unit­ed States and T&T will con­tin­ue to be warm and ben­e­fi­cial to both par­ties, they want the new ad­min­is­tra­tion to kill T&T. That is gov­ern­ment UNC style.”

The mo­tion was sub­se­quent­ly ap­proved and the cor­re­spond­ing bill passed be­fore the sit­ting was ad­journed just be­fore 8 pm.


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