Gail Alexan­der

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.