SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Dami­an Ly­der is call­ing on the Fi­nance Min­is­ter to come clean about the amount of mon­ey owed to man­u­fac­tur­ers for VAT re­funds.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC’s) press con­fer­ence on Sun­day, Ly­der said busi­ness­men have been call­ing for their re­funds re­peat­ed­ly, with no word from the Gov­ern­ment as to when they will be paid.

Re­fer­ring to ar­ti­cles in two dai­ly news­pa­pers, Ly­der posed sev­er­al ques­tions of his own to the Fi­nance Min­is­ter.

“My first ques­tion is what is the true and to­tal val­ue of VAT re­funds out­stand­ing?

How many bil­lions are be­ing owed? Is it three bil­lion? Is it sev­en bil­lion? Come clean. This is not your mon­ey. Tell the stake­hold­ers how much is out­stand­ing,” Ly­der said.

He al­so wants Im­bert to say when the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to pay these out­stand­ing re­funds, ask­ing what time frame the Gov­ern­ment needs to have the funds avail­able.

Ly­der said the stake­hold­ers de­serve to know.

“Let me re­mind you that it’s not your mon­ey to hold, to keep, to use as an in­ter­est-free loan. You are writ­ing the bal­ance sheets of the pri­vate sec­tor to ar­ti­fi­cial­ly re­duce the re­port­ed Gov­ern­ment debt po­si­tion. I’m stat­ing it here,” he said.

Ly­der said busi­ness own­ers can­not plan to ex­pand and grow their op­er­a­tions with­out their re­funds. He said by with­hold­ing the re­funds, the Gov­ern­ment was forc­ing busi­ness own­ers to make their in­vest­ments out­side of the coun­try.

He al­so lev­elled ac­cu­sa­tions of nepo­tism against the Gov­ern­ment, say­ing, “It has come to our at­ten­tion that a cho­sen few busi­ness­es in this coun­try who are aligned to this cur­rent PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion, who are fi­nanciers of this PNM po­lit­i­cal par­ty, a few of the big boys, just a few, a cho­sen few are get­ting their VAT re­funds ex­pe­dit­ed. Tongues are wag­ging around Port of Spain, I cast no as­per­sions, but we are hear­ing this.”

He called on Im­bert to say whether there was any truth to these ac­cu­sa­tions and sep­a­rate ac­cu­sa­tions that a pref­er­en­tial few were be­ing giv­en ac­cess to for­eign ex­change.

“Tell us who these busi­ness­es are and why they are get­ting pref­er­en­tial treat­ment. Be­cause it ap­pears that the on­ly way you can sur­vive in this econ­o­my, the on­ly way you can grow and thrive is if you can rub shoul­ders…if you rub shoul­ders with se­nior gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials, that’s the on­ly way to make it in this coun­try,” Ly­der said.

He said the Gov­ern­ment need­ed to fix sev­er­al cru­cial things re­lat­ing to busi­ness for the econ­o­my to thrive, in­clud­ing im­prov­ing the ease of do­ing busi­ness, eq­ui­table dis­tri­b­u­tion of for­eign ex­change and pay­ing VAT re­funds.

“If this gov­ern­ment can­not fix these three prob­lems then any oth­er pro­pos­al in their bud­get will fall bar­ren, it will mean noth­ing,” Ly­der said.

Guardian Me­dia sent ques­tions to Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert, seek­ing a re­sponse to Ly­der’s state­ments. Al­though the mes­sages were read, there was no re­sponse and sub­se­quent mes­sages could not be de­liv­ered to the Min­is­ter’s What­sApp.