An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

The Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers (CR­BC) met with Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert yes­ter­day and high on the agen­da was the on­go­ing is­sue of the for­eign ex­change short­age that is main­ly af­fect­ing the SME sec­tor.

CR­BC’s chair­man Vivek Char­ran told Guardian Me­dia that the meet­ing with the min­is­ter was very pro­duc­tive and very en­gag­ing and a di­verse set of cham­bers were present.

He said the cham­ber heads ex­pressed the chal­lenges the SME sec­tor faces with re­gards to ac­cess­ing for­eign ex­change.

“Gen­er­al­ly, the dis­cus­sion al­so went to the cut in cred­it card ex­pen­di­tures when it comes to US dol­lars. How that im­pacts the sup­ply of forex? What was al­so dis­cussed was how best the gov­ern­ment and the Cen­tral Bank can work to­geth­er with in­put from cham­bers to as­sist in how forex is dis­trib­uted with­in the com­mer­cial banks,” Char­ran ex­plained.

Then, he said many cham­ber heads in­di­cat­ed that this chal­lenge will cause a domi­no ef­fect as if the small busi­ness­es, es­pe­cial­ly re­tail busi­ness­es, do not have ac­cess to enough forex, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that have fi­nan­cial li­a­bil­i­ties in the bank, there can be fore­clo­sure, which will force the es­tab­lish­ment to close its doors.

“The banks them­selves don't see how the busi­ness­es can con­tin­ue if they can't gen­er­ate enough lo­cal rev­enue be­cause they can't get forex to stock their shelves. The bank will cal­cu­late it based on their risk, which is bet­ter they fore­close on the col­lat­er­al rather than con­tin­ue to sup­port a busi­ness that can't go any­where or can't earn any rev­enue to off­set their li­a­bil­i­ties,” he de­tailed.

In turn, Min­is­ter Im­bert told the cham­bers present that his min­istry will be look­ing at how best it can cre­ate a fa­cil­i­ty, where­by the monies in­ject­ed in­to the bank­ing sys­tem can be used specif­i­cal­ly among oth­er bod­ies, where there can be a spe­cif­ic amount set aside for SMEs.

He told CR­BC to write to his min­istry team about the is­sues dis­cussed.

Al­so, Char­ran not­ed the cham­bers sug­gest­ed that when for­eign­ers en­ter the coun­try to buy things,  they can be al­lowed to pay in the US, in­stead of the has­sle of go­ing to the bank and pur­chas­ing TT dol­lars.  

An­oth­er sug­ges­tion that was put for­ward by the |CR­BC head was to work with the Chi­nese Em­bassy, to get a Chi­nese cur­ren­cy fund, that busi­ness­es can ac­cess to pur­chase goods from Chi­na, and ease up the bur­den of us­ing US cur­ren­cy.

Present at the meet­ing were Siparia Cham­ber, Fyz­abad Cham­ber, To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber, East­ern, Mer­chant As­so­ci­a­tion, T&T Re­tail­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber, and T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vices (TTC­SI).