Shas­tri Boodan

The PNM’s To­ba­go Coun­cil has been ac­cused once again of at­tempt­ing to mis­lead To­bag­o­ni­ans.

On Mon­day, the To­ba­go Coun­cil held a news con­fer­ence an­nounc­ing that the THA would have $1.78 bil­lion come 2022.

Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Far­ley Au­gus­tine said these state­ments by the PNM are an at­tempt to cov­er up the fact that $163 mil­lion was spent by the oust­ed PNM con­trolled THA in a few months.

Au­gus­tine said, “That’s a clas­sic ex­am­ple of play­ing smart with stu­pid­ness. I spoke of three things at the press con­fer­ence last week. Num­ber one was un­spent bal­ances and at this point, it’s just over $50 mil­lion. Num­ber two, the $163 mil­lion bond fi­nanc­ing was all spent out in un­der six months the ma­jor­i­ty of pay­ments oc­curred be­tween Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber and num­ber three our Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund which is the equiv­a­lent to the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund on­ly have a lit­tle over $300,000 in it, those are the ma­te­r­i­al facts. I will re­lease lat­er ac­tu­al de­tails of our ac­counts com­par­ing sev­er­al pe­ri­ods.”

He added: “What they are say­ing is we spend out all the sav­ings of the THA but we will get some mon­ey com­ing in. That’s not the point I am mak­ing. The monies are be­ing al­lo­cat­ed from the na­tion­al bud­get. Those come quar­ter­ly, those are al­lo­cat­ed in the ma­jor­i­ty for re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture so peo­ple would get their salaries but what about the de­vel­op­ment side of things and we need to aug­ment that with our sav­ings.”

Au­gus­tine said sav­ings can­not be spent and then lat­er de­clared that it’s not a prob­lem be­cause funds will come from the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment.

He said an au­dit on the THA ac­counts would be tak­ing place but he was not will­ing to dis­close more on this process.

Speak­ing on the re-open­ing of beach­es, Au­gus­tine said To­bag­o­ni­ans are elat­ed.

He said, “I see the Prime Min­is­ter jumped ahead of us and did it so I am hap­py that we did not have to fight over it but that was a fight we were pre­pared to take to the cen­tral gov­ern­ment in open­ing the beach­es for To­ba­go. We can’t have any form of tourism prod­ucts with­out the beach­es be­ing open so sev­er­al groups of busi­ness­es will now ben­e­fit from that new pol­i­cy.”

Au­gus­tine said is­sues such as the open­ing of beach­es are dic­tat­ed by the Gov­ern­ment in Trinidad.

He said all of this can be re­solved if To­ba­go has its fed­er­al type gov­ern­ment sim­i­lar to what op­er­at­ed in sev­er­al Com­mon­wealth coun­tries.

Au­gus­tine said this mat­ter would be raised in his next meet­ing with the Prime Min­is­ter.

“We un­der­stand that he might be very busy, his head hot right now, my first for­mal sit down with any­body in the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment will hap­pen to­mor­row (to­day) and that will be with the Min­istry of Fi­nance.”