RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has dis­missed Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young’s claims that the Trinidad and To­ba­go dol­lar will be de­val­ued un­der her lead­er­ship, say­ing her ad­min­is­tra­tion will find mon­ey through pru­dent spend­ing, eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and job cre­ation to ex­e­cute plans.

Speak­ing af­ter fil­ing her nom­i­na­tion pa­pers at the Siparia Re­turn­ing Of­fice on Mary Street, Siparia, yes­ter­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said: “That is not true. The Prime Min­is­ter made a Freudi­an slip. De­val­u­a­tion is what they plan­ning to do, not us. They have not di­ver­si­fied the econ­o­my, they have crip­pled oil and gas, and if they didn’t call elec­tions be­fore the bud­get, they would have de­val­ued.”

She re­vealed that her team had al­ready pre­pared a full eco­nom­ic plan to restart the dwin­dling econ­o­my.

When asked to com­ment on how she planned to fi­nance projects if re­turned to of­fice, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said, “Go on the web­site and look at our plans. In 2010, we found the mon­ey and we will do it again. We will cut out waste and un­nec­es­sary ex­pen­di­ture. Mon­ey has been wast­ed un­der this Gov­ern­ment and there is noth­ing to show for it.”

She said the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship had proven its abil­i­ty to find rev­enue and fund projects, be­fore adding: “We have a track record. We will cre­ate jobs and in­crease rev­enue streams. We will find new ones. We did it be­fore and we will do it again.”

Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so crit­i­cised Gov­ern­ment’s $1 mil­lion pay­out to the fam­i­lies of four divers who died in Paria’s pipeline and the lone sur­vivor Christo­pher Boodram.

“So many years and they could not find com­pen­sa­tion. I called on them to do it. I said if they didn’t do it, we would. But now, just be­fore the elec­tion, they find mon­ey? Where did they get it from? How did they ar­rive at that fig­ure? Did they pull it out of a hat?”

She called the pay­out “too lit­tle, too late” and sug­gest­ed it could amount to elec­tion bribery.

“It is a shame­less ac­tion. Why didn’t you pay them be­fore?” she asked.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so ac­cused Gov­ern­ment of en­gag­ing in se­cret meet­ings with Venezue­lan of­fi­cials, warn­ing of the im­pli­ca­tions of those re­la­tion­ships.

“Stu­art went to Venezuela sev­er­al times se­cret­ly. No­body knows what he went for. There’s no dis­cus­sion about the meet­ings. Del­cy (Ro­driguez) was brought in se­cret­ly, and I ex­posed that. The whole thing is shroud­ed in se­cre­cy,” she added.

“If they con­tin­ue with this, no good will come out of it,” she added.

She vowed to as­sist na­tion­als first.

“Home first, yes, T&T first—but no man is an is­land. We will have to co-op­er­ate with Cari­com and ex­tra Cari­com in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.”

Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so con­firmed that changes were nec­es­sary for the up­com­ing elec­tion. This in­clud­ed a swap be­tween Fyz­abad MP Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe and Oropouche West MP Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo.

“Tan­coo is orig­i­nal­ly from Fyz­abad, and (Lack­ram) Bo­doe lives close, so it made sense. There will al­ways be peo­ple un­hap­py but the ma­jor­i­ty are hap­py,” she said.