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Saturday, July 12, 2025

PM urges citizens to curb Forex spending

by

2844 days ago
20170928

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is in­sist­ing his Gov­ern­ment has no in­ten­tion of de­valu­ing the T&T dol­lar.

How­ev­er, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert says if T&T im­ports con­tin­ue to ex­ceed its ex­port we could find our­selves in prob­lems.

Row­ley made the com­ment at a press con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency, fol­low­ing Gov­ern­ment’s con­sul­ta­tion on the state of the econ­o­my, in re­sponse to ques­tions on whether de­val­u­a­tion was ahead giv­en the high con­sump­tion by cit­i­zens cou­pled with low for­eign ex­change re­serves for Gov­ern­ment.

But Row­ley said that was not a mat­ter for him at “this point in time” but for Im­bert.

“But I am not treat­ing with any de­val­u­a­tion. What I was speak­ing to was the whole ques­tion of how we man­age our for­eign ex­change…it’s avail­abil­i­ty and util­i­sa­tion, giv­en the fact that the stream of for­eign ex­change has con­sid­er­ably been re­duced and the short to medi­um term would be in that sit­u­a­tion, so how we treat with it, so who­ev­er is min­is­ter of fi­nance in Trinidad and To­ba­go, that is part of his job. So let us see what he does,” Row­ley said.

Row­ley said T&T had al­ready bor­rowed $7 bil­lion.

“And that is…most of it is in for­eign ex­change. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of that has to be paid in US dol­lars. So if you keep on bor­row­ing ex­ter­nal­ly with­out an eye on how you are go­ing to re­pay, and you get your­self to a point when that for­eign debt is due you don’t have the for­eign cur­ren­cy to pay, that is calami­ty you must avoid at all cost,” Row­ley said.

Im­bert then in­ter­ject­ed, say­ing he learnt at the dis­cus­sion that im­ports had ex­ceed­ed ex­ports in terms of dol­lar val­ue.

“That is an un­ten­able sit­u­a­tion. The point the Prime Min­is­ter is mak­ing, we can­not con­tin­ue like this. If we can­not sup­press de­mand so that the val­ue of im­port falls be­low the val­ue of ex­ports, then there would be so much pres­sure on the ex­change rate that in­evitably there would have to be some move­ment. But the Prime Min­is­ter was not say­ing re­mote­ly, even in­di­rect­ly, that there was a de­val­u­a­tion that is go­ing to take place,” Im­bert said.

Im­bert said we are now spend­ing more US dol­lars than we are earn­ing and re­serves are de­plet­ing, while there was so much they can do in go­ing to the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket to bor­row.

“We have al­most maxed out there as far as I am con­cerned,” Im­bert said.

He al­so gave an up­date in­to the wind­ing up of CL Fi­nan­cial, say­ing the liq­uida­tors were now in place.

“They would now go through the process of an or­der­ly liq­ui­da­tion of CL Fi­nan­cial, pri­mar­i­ly to re­pay the $15 bil­lion of tax­pay­ers mon­ey that was put in­to this pri­vate com­pa­ny.”

The to­tal fig­ure in­ject­ed in­to Cl Fi­nan­cial was $23 bil­lion, he said.

“We have re­cov­ered about $8 bil­lion so we are look­ing at $15 bil­lion of the peo­ple’s mon­ey that was put in­to a pri­vate com­pa­ny. We in the Gov­ern­ment are look­ing at what we should do with the as­sets held by CL Fi­nan­cial group as the liq­ui­da­tion takes place.”

He said more in­for­ma­tion on CL Fi­nan­cial will be an­nounced in Mon­day’s bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion.


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