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Thursday, July 10, 2025

38,000 apply for salary relief grants

by

Gail Alexander
1910 days ago
20200416
People wait in line outside the National Insurance Board in San Fernando to apply for salary relief grants yesterday.

People wait in line outside the National Insurance Board in San Fernando to apply for salary relief grants yesterday.

RISHI RAGOONATH

Gov­ern­ment has so far re­ceived just over 38,000 ap­pli­ca­tions for salary re­lief grants and pay­ments are ex­pect­ed to start flow­ing in the next cou­ple weeks, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said yes­ter­day.

At yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, Im­bert said min­istry’s in­for­ma­tion from yes­ter­day morn­ing list­ed 4,161 hand-de­liv­ered ap­pli­ca­tions at TTPost drop box­es and 34,000 on­line ap­pli­ca­tions.

He said the ap­pli­ca­tions— though not all—are now be­ing eval­u­at­ed and es­ti­mat­ed that with­in two weeks the first set of grants can be start­ed.

Im­bert said he’s al­so propos­ing that the Fi­nance and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­istries har­monise units to han­dle the in­come sup­port grants. Fi­nance is han­dling ap­pli­ca­tions falling un­der the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB) sys­tem while So­cial De­vel­op­ment is han­dling those not un­der the NIB’s net. The pro­pos­al has to be ap­proved by Cab­i­net.

Gov­ern­ment has set aside $400 mil­lion for the pro­gramme, which caters to those peo­ple who lost jobs due to health and safe­ty mea­sures tak­en by Gov­ern­ment in the COVID-19 cri­sis. The fund­ing caters for April, May and June.

Im­bert said he didn’t know what would hap­pen af­ter June.

“We catered for three months, …what hap­pens in June ... I don’t have a crys­tal ball, I don’t know what will hap­pen in June,” he said.

On bor­row­ings, he said Gov­ern­ment al­ready has ap­proval for US$200 mil­lion from the An­dean (CAF) bank for air/sea in­fra­struc­ture and trans­port. That bank al­so ap­proved US$50 mil­lion for COVID emer­gency loans. There’s al­so Cab­i­net ap­proval to get US$100m from the same bank and a US$350m CAF loan is al­so avail­able as soon as re­quest­ed.

Im­bert said Gov­ern­ment is al­so bor­row­ing lo­cal­ly since bor­row­ing in TT dol­lars is bet­ter for cred­it rat­ing ex­am­i­na­tions than bor­row­ing in US dol­lars.

“We’re man­ag­ing lo­cal bor­row­ings quite well,” he said.

Im­bert al­so said about 40 Trinidad en­ti­ties and 20 from To­ba­go have sub­mit­ted ten­ders for man­u­fac­tur­ing cloth face masks. The Bu­reau of Stan­dards and UTT will ex­am­ine sam­ples sub­mit­ted, he added.

COVID-19


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