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Wednesday, May 21, 2025

$1b COVID-19 stimulus package

by

Shaliza Hassanali
1884 days ago
20200323
Finance Minister Colm Imbert during yesterday’s press conference at the Diplomatic Centre in St Ann’s.

Finance Minister Colm Imbert during yesterday’s press conference at the Diplomatic Centre in St Ann’s.

SHIRLEY BAHADUR

Cit­i­zens of this coun­ty who lose their jobs as a re­sult of the mea­sures be­ing put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19 will be able to ac­cess a Salary Re­lief Grant of $1,500 a month for the next three months, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert an­nounced yes­ter­day.

The grant is ex­pect­ed to help over 80,000 cit­i­zens and will cost tax­pay­ers around $400 mil­lion, Im­bert said dur­ing a press con­fer­ence where Gov­ern­ment un­veiled sev­er­al mea­sures be­ing put in a place as part of a bil­lion-dol­lar plan to help cush­ion the eco­nom­ic im­pact of the strin­gent ac­tion be­ing tak­en to bat­tle COVID-19.

In all, the Gov­ern­ment is ex­pect­ed to need around $9 bil­lion to ad­dress the coun­try’s cur­rent eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion, in­clud­ing the dra­mat­ic fall in oil prices and the ar­rival of the virus on our shores.

Im­bert al­so an­nounced sweep­ing mea­sures to help busi­ness­es and in­di­vid­u­als cope in the face of harsh eco­nom­ic times ex­pect­ed as a re­sult of the COVID-19 fall­out.

“The most im­por­tant mea­sure, how­ev­er, that the team has de­cid­ed is nec­es­sary, is a Salary Re­lief grant be­cause we recog­nise that be­cause of the mea­sures that are be­ing tak­en and be­cause of the is­sues as­so­ci­at­ed with this pan­dem­ic that there will be per­sons who will be un­em­ployed and what we have cho­sen to do, we have de­cid­ed that in­di­vid­u­als who have been tem­porar­i­ly un­em­ployed or tem­porar­i­ly dis­placed as a re­sult of the pre­vail­ing sit­u­a­tion will be el­i­gi­ble for a grant of up to $1,500 per month for a three-month pe­ri­od,” Im­bert said.

So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is added, how­ev­er, that Venezue­lans who have been work­ing here and lose their jobs will not be en­ti­tled to this grant.

Im­bert said he an­tic­i­pates in­di­vid­u­als em­ployed in the food and bev­er­age, hos­pi­tal­i­ty and en­ter­tain­ment sec­tors may be ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed by some of the de­ci­sions tak­en to help stop the virus’ spread. He said last week he had a dis­cus­sion with sev­er­al of this coun­try’s busi­ness cham­bers and called on them to have their mem­bers keep peo­ple em­ployed for at least four weeks.

Im­bert said the Salary Re­lief Grant will be ad­min­is­tered through the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB).

“The rea­son why we are us­ing the Na­tion­al in­sur­ance Board is be­cause they have a data­base on all per­sons with­in the PAYE (Pay As You Earn) sys­tem, which is hun­dreds of thou­sands of per­sons,” Im­bert said.

“So since NIB has all the da­ta on all these peo­ple al­ready, where they work and so on, who they are, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ments with re­spect to these peo­ple, we felt the best thing to do is to use the NIB.”

The Gov­ern­ment will sup­ply the fund­ing to the NIB, he said.

Im­bert said the de­tails and the qual­i­fi­ca­tion cri­te­ria for the grant will be de­cid­ed over the next sev­en days.

“We recog­nise that peo­ple will be go­ing through hard­ship in this pe­ri­od and we thought as a Gov­ern­ment, we had to do this,” Im­bert said.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley al­so said while the NIB and its data­base is be­ing used, the Gov­ern­ment knows that there will be peo­ple who will not be on the NIB list who may ap­ply for the grant.

“And one of the rea­sons for that would be per­sons who would not have been com­ply­ing and what this sit­u­a­tion will do is those per­sons who are not on the list and were em­ployed and are now not cov­ered or iden­ti­fied on the NIB list that says some­thing for and about the em­ploy­er but such per­sons can ap­proach the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment for that so­cial de­vel­op­ment as­sis­tance but that ac­tion will iden­ti­fy per­sons who should have been on the NIB record,” Row­ley said.

COVID-19


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