The Stud­ley Park En­ter­prise Lim­it­ed (SPEL), a sub­sidiary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) charged with the pro­duc­tion of an­desite rock was de­nied the rights to an ex­port li­cence by the Min­er­als Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee.

This is ac­cord­ing to In­fra­struc­ture Sec­re­tary Trevor James as he spoke on a lo­cal tele­vi­sion morn­ing pro­gramme.

James said there was a sig­nif­i­cant de­mand for To­ba­go’s rock in Guyana. He said the com­pa­ny was ready­ing it­self to cap­i­talise on this and oth­er rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties, when its ef­forts were stymied by the statu­to­ry body.

“This is one of the at­tempts by the State in Trinidad and the gov­ern­ment in Trinidad to con­strain To­ba­go’s abil­i­ty to self-ac­tu­alise, to in­crease our rev­enue; and there­fore to lim­it what we can do as a gov­ern­ment in To­ba­go, and that is all that this is. They sit in Par­lia­ment and Min­istries and de­ter­mine that our To­ba­go re­sources are theirs and they must de­ter­mine what hap­pens to it. And that is the con­ver­sa­tion that should be over­tak­ing To­ba­go as we move in­to the New Year in this push to au­ton­o­my again. Who in To­ba­go sup­ports this?”

Ac­cord­ing to a let­ter by the Min­er­al Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee dat­ed, Sep­tem­ber 23, the re­fusal to grant the li­cence was based on the lim­it­ed avail­abil­i­ty of ma­te­r­i­al on the lo­cal mar­ket.

How­ev­er, James said that the let­ter pro­vid­ed no ev­i­dence of a short­age of ma­te­r­i­al or rather a quan­ti­ties re­port for projects na­tion­al­ly.

He in­di­cat­ed how­ev­er that many of the in­fra­struc­ture projects in Trinidad have stalled for rea­sons un­con­nect­ed to SPEL.

The mat­ter is cur­rent­ly en­gag­ing the at­ten­tion of the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil and its le­gal ad­vi­sors.