PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Tri­cia Coos­al as been ap­point­ed as the new Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion.

Coos­al’s ap­point­ment as the 65th Pres­i­dent, was con­firmed at the TTMA’s An­nu­al Gen­er­al meet­ing at the Hy­att on Wednes­day.

She suc­ceeds Fran­ka Costel­lo as Pres­i­dent, be­com­ing the as­so­ci­a­tion’s third fe­male pres­i­dent since its in­cep­tion in 1956.

Coos­al had served as Costel­lo’s Vice Pres­i­dent for the past two years.

Coos­al, an Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor of Fi­nance and Ad­min­is­tra­tion at the Coos­al’s Group of Com­pa­nies, has been a Di­rec­tor with the TTMA for the past 4 years and al­so serves as chair of the Leg­isla­tive Com­mit­tee and is Vice Chair of the In­fra­struc­ture Com­mit­tee.

While ad­dress­ing the TTMA mem­ber­ship yes­ter­day Coos­al said, “To you the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, in my ca­pac­i­ty as Pres­i­dent, I am com­mit­ted to en­sure an en­abling en­vi­ron­ment is cre­at­ed. This al­lows for trade to pros­per and grow, our man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­try to ex­pand and op­er­ate in a less than op­ti­mal en­vi­ron­ment, for the non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor to re­al­ize its po­ten­tial to ex­pand ex­ports and to as­sist in the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion poli­cies of the gov­ern­ment.”

Coos­al al­so thank for­mer Pres­i­dent Costel­lo and gave her com­mit­ment to work with the Min­is­ter of Trade and gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go to im­prove the ease of do­ing busi­ness while al­so out­lin­ing an­tic­i­pat­ed chal­lenges such as il­lic­it trade and port is­sues.

In her ad­dress at the AGM, Min­is­ter of Trade Paula Gopee-Scoon sim­i­lar­ly ac­knowl­edged the need to im­prove the ease of do­ing busi­ness in Trinidad and To­ba­go, not­ing it was among the trans­for­ma­tive mea­sures high­light­ed in the roadmap for re­cov­ery.

“In Feb­ru­ary 2021, Cab­i­net ap­proved 61 Busi­ness Process Re-en­gi­neer­ing (BPR) rec­om­men­da­tions to im­prove the ease of do­ing busi­ness in Trad­ing across Bor­ders,” said Gopee-Scoon, who said this would be done over the course the next six months through the im­ple­men­ta­tion of var­i­ous mea­sures in­clud­ing the in­tro­duc­tion on­line pay­ments via TTBi­zLinK and Cus­toms e-ser­vices, an au­dit of op­er­a­tions to in­crease ef­fi­cien­cy in the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion as well as the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a Port Com­mu­ni­ty Sys­tem (PCS) to al­low se­cure ex­change of in­for­ma­tion be­tween pub­lic and pri­vate stake­hold­ers along the port and lo­gis­tics sup­ply chain.

Min­is­ter Gopee-Scoon al­so stressed it was im­por­tant to in­crease ex­ports par­tic­u­lar­ly af­ter the chal­lenges faced dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

“Our trade re­lat­ed sup­port in­sti­tu­tions must be trans­formed. Ac­cord­ing­ly, un­der the EBI re­sources have been made avail­able for the In­sti­tu­tion­al Strength­en­ing of EX­PORTT and TTMA,” said the Min­is­ter.

“The ob­jec­tive is to trans­form and mod­ern­ize ex­porTT in­to a lead­ing ex­port pro­mo­tion agency.” she added.