The Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Colm Im­bert, has cleared the air on the tran­sit sheds where il­le­gal guns were re­port­ed­ly stolen.

Speak­ing in the Sen­ate on Tues­day, Min­is­ter Im­bert said over 150,000 pack­ages ware ex­pect­ed this month, but there were is­sues with two of the pri­vate trans­fer sheds.

“One tran­sit shed was closed down be­cause its se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems were to­tal­ly non-func­tion­al. Un­known per­sons broke in, tam­pered with pack­ages, and re­moved items which we sus­pect are il­le­gal items—such as guns and am­mu­ni­tion,” he said.

He said the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion was track­ing pack­ages of in­ter­est iden­ti­fied by in­ter­na­tion­al law en­force­ment and those pack­ages dis­ap­peared from that tran­sit shed and could not be found three months lat­er.

How­ev­er, fol­low­ing a news­pa­per re­port (not the T&T Guardian) on the mat­ter yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter Im­bert felt the need to of­fer clar­i­fi­ca­tion.

“The truth is, the tran­sit sheds that the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance re­ferred to are owned and op­er­at­ed by pri­vate com­pa­nies and it is be­cause the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion dis­cov­ered that se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems were non-func­tion­al, pack­ages had dis­ap­peared, and record keep­ing was poor at these pri­vate fa­cil­i­ties, that these pri­vate tran­sit sheds were closed, tem­porar­i­ly, un­til their own­ers reme­died the de­fects in their se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems and records.”

He added that this un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion had con­tributed to the cur­rent con­ges­tion in the clear­ing of car­go at this time of the year since the space for in­spec­tion of air car­go, specif­i­cal­ly couri­er car­go, was now very lim­it­ed due to the clo­sure of these pri­vate tran­sit sheds.

In re­cent days, busi­ness groups and couri­er com­pa­nies have been com­plain­ing about what they de­scribed as slow op­er­a­tions by Cus­toms of­fi­cers in clear­ing goods shipped in­to this coun­try.

An­swer­ing a ques­tion on the mat­ter on Tues­day, Min­is­ter Im­bert said the Gov­ern­ment was do­ing all it could to en­sure the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion could quick­ly and ef­fi­cient­ly clear the cur­rent back­log of pack­ages by hav­ing of­fi­cers work longer hours and even trans­fer­ring of­fi­cers from one area to as­sist with the back­log.