DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

A for­mer gov­ern­ment min­is­ter says it is no shock that Gov­ern­ment may be con­sid­er­ing in­tro­duc­ing tax­es to bal­ance the scales af­ter record­ing a sig­nif­i­cant de­cline in oil and gas rev­enue.

Ac­cord­ing to Karen Nunez-Tesheira, a for­mer Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Trinidad and To­ba­go is in a des­per­ate po­si­tion.

And, she says, she does not be­lieve that the Op­po­si­tion has an of­fi­cial Cab­i­net Note in its pos­ses­sion, in­di­cat­ing pro­posed tax in­creas­es.

Mrs Nunez-Tesheira says she ac­cepts Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert's ex­pla­na­tion that the Op­po­si­tion has a doc­u­ment which proves that the State was de­ter­min­ing what it would earn or lose if tax­es were in­creased or re­duced.

“I sus­pect they may be con­sid­er­ing in­creas­ing the VAT on cer­tain, what you call, high-end prod­ucts. The ones where you're look­ing at not the every­day prod­uct,” she told Guardian Me­dia. 

“When I say, ‘every­day prod­uct’, I mean the every­day, mid­dle class prod­ucts,” she ex­plained. “But the high-end prod­ucts—I be­lieve they may be think­ing of in­creas­ing VAT there. Maybe that’s a con­sid­er­a­tion.”

The for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter al­so con­demned the gov­ern­ment's fail­ure to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my as she cit­ed a World Bank re­port that ex­clud­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go in its glob­al growth prospects re­port.