More help is com­ing for small busi­ness­es dur­ing this fi­nan­cial­ly dif­fi­cult time, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has an­nounced.

Im­bert made the state­ment yes­ter­day dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence held by the Fi­nance Min­istry.

Small busi­ness­es will soon be of­fered an in­ter­est-free loan that they will not have to make a pay­ment on for two years, Im­bert said.

“We are fi­nal­is­ing the loan pro­gramme this week where the First Cit­i­zens will be is­su­ing soft loans to small busi­ness­es, small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es, over a four-year pe­ri­od with a two-year mora­to­ri­um on pay­ments and the Gov­ern­ment will be cov­er­ing all of the in­ter­est,” Im­bert said.

“So that the small busi­ness will be able to ac­cess these loans which are re­al­ly to help them out with their op­er­a­tional ex­pens­es dur­ing this very dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od, with­out hav­ing to make a sin­gle pay­ment for the first two years so that the gov­ern­ment will pay the in­ter­est through­out the four year pe­ri­od, the busi­ness will not have to make any pay­ments on the prin­ci­pal dur­ing the first two years and they start to pay in year three and com­plete in year four,” he said.

Im­bert said the loan will be ap­proved this week for “im­me­di­ate im­ple­men­ta­tion.”

“We are hop­ing the oth­er banks will fall in we are star­ing with FCB one of the gov­ern­ment-owned banks we are hop­ing the oth­er banks will fall in quick­ly,” Im­bert said.

Im­bert said the loans will help give busi­ness­es time to re­cov­er from the fi­nan­cial strains they are cur­rent­ly fac­ing.

He said a loan fa­cil­i­ty for cred­it unions specif­i­cal­ly de­signed for small busi­ness­es has al­so been or­gan­ised.

The state has pro­vid­ed the cred­it unions with $100 mil­lion to fa­cil­i­tate this.

In ad­di­tion to this Im­bert said the Board of In­land Rev­enue has so far paid $449,335,000 in val­ue added tax bonds.

He de­nied al­le­ga­tions that the gov­ern­ment was with­hold­ing these pay­ments for mon­ey owed.

“I just want to make it crys­tal clear that no­body’s VAT bonds are be­ing with­held be­cause they may owe small amounts of tax. That’s a mis­un­der­stand­ing that was put in the sys­tem by a pri­vate ac­count­ing firm,” Im­bert said.

Im­bert’s state­ment came in re­sponse to a let­ter to the ed­i­tor from Wil­fred Es­pinet which was pub­lished yes­ter­day.

Im­bert said the sit­u­a­tion oc­curred be­cause a lo­cal ac­count­ing firm omit­ted an im­por­tant de­tail from a re­lease is­sued by the Fi­nance Min­istry.

He said the omit­ted line stat­ed, “any li­a­bil­i­ties that re­main out­stand­ing would be de­duct­ed from the amount due be­fore bonds are is­sued.”

He called the sit­u­a­tion “very re­gret­table and un­for­tu­nate.”