PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try, Paula Gopee-Scoon, yes­ter­day de­scribed Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s com­ments on In­di­an busi­ness­man Naveen Jin­dal as very dis­ap­point­ing.

The Op­po­si­tion Leader raised the point that Jin­dal had been fac­ing al­leged cor­rup­tion charges at the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress’ Mon­day Night Fo­rum ear­li­er this week. She ques­tioned if there had been in­flu­ence by Venezue­lan lead­ers on his vis­it to Trinidad ear­li­er this month amid po­ten­tial in­ter­est in the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.

“It is very dis­ap­point­ing that the op­po­si­tion would seek to make may­hem over the vis­it of some­one who can re­al­ly help us in Trinidad and To­ba­go by re­al­ly in­vest­ing in our coun­try. If you do your re­search you would un­der­stand the wealth and ca­pa­bil­i­ty of the Jin­dal fam­i­ly. For in­stance if you look at the ten top peo­ple of wealth in In­dia, the Jin­dal fam­i­ly would be there.

“So the things said by the op­po­si­tion in the na­tion­al press are very dis­ap­point­ing and it tells you that in­stead of wel­com­ing peo­ple to our coun­try, the Op­po­si­tion per­haps is seek­ing to de­stroy,” Gopee-Scoon said dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day.

At the news con­fer­ence, Gopee-Scoon up­dat­ed the me­dia con­cern­ing the vis­it of a del­e­ga­tion from the HAFED state co­op­er­a­tive from the In­di­an state of Haryana.

Gopee-Scoon said in­vari­ably busi­ness own­ers do face le­gal ob­sta­cles, but it did not nec­es­sar­i­ly re­flect the char­ac­ter of the in­di­vid­ual.

She said, “In the life of any busi­ness you would have chal­lenges, le­gal chal­lenges, that is the na­ture of busi­ness. You en­ter in­to con­trac­tu­al arrange­ments, con­trac­tu­al arrange­ments are not nec­es­sar­i­ly all smooth. It’s the rea­son why you have this cadre of lawyers and at­tor­neys who are pre­pared to deal with such mat­ters. There­fore, to as­sign that lev­el of at­ten­tion on one mi­nor is­sue is re­al­ly a won­der to us that that is go­ing to be the fo­cus when Trinidad and To­ba­go should be look­ing at hav­ing in­vestors and wel­com­ing in­vestors as we have done here.”

The Min­is­ter felt more fo­cus should have been placed on the po­ten­tial im­prove­ments that could be achieved via such in­vestors.

“Re­flect on the lev­el of in­vest­ments that we have had in the en­er­gy sec­tor and the suc­cess that it has brought in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go. Let’s wel­come and let’s look for­ward to hav­ing fur­ther in­vest­ment in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor that would help us to grow these sec­tors and of course cre­ate for­eign ex­change by ex­port­ing etc,” she said.

Trinidad and To­ba­go’s High Com­mis­sion­er to In­dia, High Com­mis­sion­er Dr Roger Gopaul not­ed that Jin­dal is cur­rent­ly a sit­ting mem­ber of the gov­ern­ment of In­dia.

“The me­dia could eas­i­ly find any in­for­ma­tion on the work that Mr. Jin­dal is do­ing glob­al­ly, and I would leave it at that,” the High Com­mis­sion­er said.