Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Sport and Youth Af­fairs Phillip Watts has vowed to en­hance dif­fer­ent mech­a­nisms to call sport­ing bod­ies to ac­count, par­tic­u­lar­ly in mat­ters of fi­nan­cial ex­pen­di­ture.

Watts made the re­marks in re­sponse to re­ports that there were sev­er­al fi­nan­cial ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties con­cern­ing the TT Crick­et Board (TTCB) as ques­tions were raised over trans­paren­cy.

The mat­ter is cur­rent­ly be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed by the po­lice.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia at a vis­it to the La Hor­quet­ta South Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School, on Fri­day af­ter­noon, Watts ad­mit­ted that the Min­istry of Sports' Sport De­vel­op­ment Unit (SDU) "fell short" in rec­on­cil­ing for the pe­ri­od 2021 to 2024.

De­spite this, he said ef­forts were un­der­way to en­hance the mech­a­nisms in place to en­sure fair­ness and trans­paren­cy.

"I'm look­ing at that and we're try­ing to put things in place to en­sure that from the Sport side, we do what we need to do be­fore we re­lease sub­ven­tions to any sport body.

"Def­i­nite­ly we will be putting mech­a­nisms in place to en­sure ac­count­abil­i­ty."

Watts, who al­so has re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for youth af­fairs not­ed that the Youth Agri­cul­tur­al Home­stead Pro­gramme (YAHP) which was ini­ti­at­ed un­der the Min­istry of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice was still ac­tive with 180 per­sons ex­pect­ed to grad­u­ate this Sep­tem­ber.

He ac­knowl­edged how­ev­er that the pro­gramme was moved from his Min­istry to the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty as there are con­sid­er­a­tions un­der­way to de­ter­mine whether it should re­main un­der his re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

Watts said one of the chal­lenges af­fect­ing the pro­gramme was the avail­abil­i­ty of land for the grad­u­ates, which was nec­es­sary.