Sascha Wil­son

There is good news for small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es as the Gov­ern­ment’s $300 mil­lion loan guar­an­tee pro­gramme is ex­pect­ed to kick off this week.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert made the an­nounce­ment dur­ing Sat­ur­day’s Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence, not­ing the pa­per­work had been com­plet­ed and ad­ver­tise­ments will in the news­pa­pers this week. He said the pro­gramme will be man­aged by First Cit­i­zens and Re­pub­lic Bank but Roy­al Bank and Sco­tia­bank have al­so in­di­cat­ed their will­ing­ness to join the pro­gramme.

“I am told by FCB that they ex­pect to process the first loan by Thurs­day next week and that this is ex­pect­ed to move very swift­ly,” Im­bert said.

“The Gov­ern­ment is pay­ing all of the loans, which range, de­pend­ing on the size of the or­gan­i­sa­tion, from $75,000 up to $325,000 and these are in­tend­ed to as­sist with pay­roll ex­pens­es and oth­er op­er­a­tional ex­pens­es. The Gov­ern­ment will pay all of the in­ter­ests on these loans, so the loans are in­ter­est-free for small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es and the Gov­ern­ment’s al­so guar­an­tee­ing 75 per cent of the loan. So this is a very gen­er­ous loan pro­gramme and it is all in the con­text of try­ing to help the busi­ness peo­ple to keep peo­ple in jobs.”

The en­ter­pris­es will not have to make any pay­ments for the first two years, Im­bert said. How­ev­er, he not­ed that the pro­gramme is for en­ter­pris­es with an an­nu­al turnover of be­tween $1 mil­lion and $20 mil­lion. For those that make less than $1 mil­lion in sales a year, he said the Cab­i­net has ap­proved a $30 mil­lion grant pro­gramme which they are now fi­nal­is­ing with the Na­tion­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny.

Im­bert said Gov­ern­ment had al­so made $100 mil­lion avail­able to cred­it unions. He said these in­sti­tu­tions will make loans avail­able to mem­bers at a max­i­mum of $5,000 per month for three months at very at­trac­tive rates with mora­to­ri­ums. To speed up the process, the cred­it unions will be us­ing their own finds.

“As the cred­it unions process the loans, they will ap­ply to the Min­istry of Fi­nance for re­im­burse­ment on a month­ly ba­sis, so that is in train and we ex­pect to re­ceive the first ap­pli­ca­tion from the cred­it unions short­ly.”

He said they are al­so mak­ing a fur­ther $100 mil­lion avail­able to cred­it unions for small busi­ness­es but the de­tails are still be­ing worked out. Im­bert said Ex­im Bank has al­so been pro­vid­ed with an ad­di­tion­al US$25 mil­lion for three months for the im­por­ta­tion of es­sen­tial foods, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, san­i­tary prod­ucts, per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment and oth­er es­sen­tial sup­plies dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Giv­ing an up­date on so­cial re­lief and fi­nan­cial grants, he said as of June 24, 42,000 peo­ple had re­ceived salary re­lief grants for April and May while the So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­istry has processed 29,000 in­come sup­port pay­ments. In ad­di­tion, he said food cards have been giv­en to 29, 399 new peo­ples at a cost of $45 mil­lion, ad­di­tion­al sup­port was giv­en to 25,000 ben­e­fi­cia­ries at a cost of $17.14 mil­lion, while 20,500 peo­ple who have chil­dren on the school feed­ing pro­gramme re­ceived food cards at a cost of $31.4 mil­lion. Rental as­sis­tance has al­so been pro­vid­ed to $1,133 fam­i­lies at a cost of $4.8 mil­lion.