Ke­jan Haynes

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ke­jan.haynes@guardian.co.tt

PANA­MA CITY—Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo has pushed back against crit­i­cism of the Gov­ern­ment’s US$1 bil­lion bond is­sue, in­sist­ing the bor­row­ing is backed by fu­ture rev­enue and not a case of pass­ing to­day’s debt on­to an­oth­er ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Speak­ing in Pana­ma dur­ing CAF’s Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum 2026, Tan­coo framed the bond against what he de­scribed as an in­her­it­ed prob­lem—a US$1 bil­lion bond raised in 2016 with no re­pay­ment mech­a­nism in place.

“When a for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter took a US$1 bil­lion bond in 2016, he put noth­ing in place to re­pay it,” Tan­coo said. “We are now look­ing straight down the road at this US$1 bil­lion bond, which we must fi­nance.”

His com­ments came af­ter for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Vish­nu Dhan­paul de­scribed the new loan as an ex­ces­sive and dan­ger­ous bur­den, ar­gu­ing the 6.5 per cent coupon rate was far high­er than pre­vi­ous is­sues and would sad­dle the coun­try with heavy in­ter­est costs for a decade.

“A lot of peo­ple think that 6.5 per cent coupon rate is ex­ceed­ing­ly high,” Dhan­paul said, point­ing to bonds is­sued in 2013 and 2016 at about 4.5 per cent.

He dis­missed claims that the is­sue re­flect­ed in­vestor con­fi­dence.

“For the min­is­ter to say that 6.5 per cent at 2.5 times over­sub­scribed is a vote of con­fi­dence is ridicu­lous,” he said.

Dhan­paul warned the an­nu­al in­ter­est bill of about US$65 mil­lion, more than TT$1 bil­lion, would strain pub­lic fi­nances and leave fu­ture gov­ern­ments to deal with the con­se­quences.

“What he’s do­ing is mort­gag­ing the en­tire coun­try for the next ten years,” he said.

Tan­coo re­ject­ed that char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, ar­gu­ing the dif­fer­ence lay in the mea­sures now be­ing put in place to gen­er­ate re­pay­ment ca­pac­i­ty.

He said the Gov­ern­ment was re­ly­ing on three main rev­enue streams: an ex­pand­ing en­er­gy sec­tor, long-term non-en­er­gy in­vest­ment and im­proved tax col­lec­tion.

He point­ed to new and re­turn­ing play­ers in the gas sec­tor, in­clud­ing ma­jor fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sions, with pro­duc­tion gains ex­pect­ed from late 2026 in­to 2027.

“We ex­pect sub­stan­tial im­prove­ments in gas pro­duc­tion and sub­stan­tial in­creas­es in rev­enue com­ing out of that,” he said.

Be­yond en­er­gy, Tan­coo cit­ed a ten-year re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion pro­gramme de­signed to at­tract for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment and di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my.

He said in­ter­na­tion­al road­shows had al­ready gen­er­at­ed strong in­vestor in­ter­est, trans­lat­ing in­to pro­ject­ed fu­ture rev­enues.

A third pil­lar, he said, was clos­ing what the IMF had iden­ti­fied as a $10 bil­lion tax gap by im­prov­ing com­pli­ance rather than rais­ing new tax­es.

“This is not new tax­a­tion,” Tan­coo said. “This is peo­ple who are sup­posed to be pay­ing tax and are not pay­ing tax.”

On the ques­tion of whether the bond sim­ply de­ferred the prob­lem, Tan­coo ar­gued the re­al bur­den stemmed from past bor­row­ing with­out a re­pay­ment plan.

“The chal­lenge we have now is a gov­ern­ment com­ing in which has to find the mon­ey to pay off his debt and then find the mon­ey to pay off the debt we owe,” he said.

While ac­knowl­edg­ing bor­row­ing re­mained un­avoid­able in the short term, Tan­coo said it was be­ing used as a bridge to growth rather than a way of shift­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to a fu­ture gov­ern­ment.