Richard Lord

In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor Rolph Bal­go­b­in says there should be a po­lice probe sev­er­al ques­tion­able new busi­ness­es be­ing es­tab­lished in T&T.He made the state­ment dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the de­bate on the Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence (Amend­ment) Bill 2011 in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day.Bal­go­b­in did not say whether he had been re­fer­ring to Chi­nese im­mi­grants.But there has been an ob­vi­ous in­flux of Chi­nese im­mi­grants in T&T.The bill was pre­sent­ed for de­bate by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan.

Bal­go­b­in said the es­tab­lish­ment of those busi­ness­es, in­clud­ing restau­rants and gro­ceries should be cause for great con­cern in these times of eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion in the coun­try."Where are these peo­ple get­ting this mon­ey from? Restau­rants, gro­ceries...If you had to leave where you were liv­ing be­cause of eco­nom­ic hard­ship and trav­el halfway around the world and come here as an eco­nom­ic mi­grant, how it is you have all this mon­ey?" he added.He said stud­ies of im­mi­gra­tion showed it took at least a gen­er­a­tion or two be­fore a fam­i­ly could gen­er­ate enough mon­ey to launch a busi­ness the size and scale be­ing es­tab­lished in T&T."What do we see now with that? We see kid­nap­ping, we see mur­der and there are in­ter­na­tion­al di­men­sions to these things," he said.Bal­go­b­in said the FIU should be es­tab­lished to deal with such mat­ters di­rect­ly.

"That is why it is so im­por­tant for us to get this thing (FIU) mov­ing.""Clear­ly many of these busi­ness­es have no clear source of fund­ing and even more im­por­tant­ly, they do not have a sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­el," he said.He said the busi­ness­es "are al­ways emp­ty but it (they) not clos­ing down."Bal­go­b­in said many of the busi­ness­men "can't speak the lan­guage, they haven't even mas­tered the ba­sics of the so­ci­eties that they are op­er­at­ing in and you have a mil­lion-dol­lar busi­ness."He said the FIU "needs to help law en­force­ment to tar­get and iden­ti­fy these peo­ple and let us lock them up."

He said de­vel­op­ment was send­ing the wrong mes­sage to young peo­ple who were study­ing hard to be­come suc­cess­ful busi­ness peo­ple in the fu­ture.He said it was not fair for those in the coun­try who were work­ing very hard to earn a liv­ing "and you just ar­rive here as a part of a crim­i­nal net­work and liv­ing large."He re­called years ago, "if you went to a Chi­na shop, the Chi­na man, as we call them, run­ning the shop would have been an el­der­ly per­son (and) you would have ad­dressed them (him) with re­spect and def­er­ence but now you have teenagers run­ning these busi­ness­es."He said while vis­it­ing one such shop re­cent­ly, he wit­nessed a T&T na­tion­al en­ter the busi­ness place and was told by the busi­ness­man, "I am not serv­ing you, get out."Bal­go­b­in asked: "Could I go and do that in their coun­try?"

Ear­li­er, Bal­go­b­in said ter­ror­ists were pass­ing through T&T.Bal­go­b­in said ter­ror­ist fund­ing net­works were glob­al."It is not to say that mon­ey hasn't passed through Trinidad and To­ba­go and it isn't here now...That is not true," he in­sist­ed.He said agen­cies like the FIU was need­ed "to get in there and catch come of those flows and at least try to stran­gle or slow down the flow of some of this kind of mon­ey."He added: "Ter­ror­ism is re­al, very re­al, es­pe­cial­ly for small coun­tries."Bal­go­b­in said it re­mained "quite easy to bring some­thing in­to To­ba­go and just put it on the fer­ry and bring it across, and guess what, that hap­pens."He said that was not a se­cret.