Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment is still stick­ing to the De­cem­ber 31 dead­line.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley the $100 note changeover is be­ing mon­i­tored and if the ad­min­is­tra­tion sees no need for an ad­just­ment of the dead­line, he’s ad­vis­ing peo­ple to try and ob­serve it. He gave this re­sponse at yes­ter­day’s White­hall post-cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing when asked about the flex­i­bil­i­ty of the changeover dead­line.

Row­ley ac­knowl­edged that it was “quite a large ex­er­cise”.

He added: “But we have rea­son to be­lieve that things have gone well. As chair­man of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, I want to tell Trinidad and To­ba­go we apol­o­gise to those who were par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­rupt­ed by this but there are sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits to be had from this ex­er­cise.”

He said he trust­ed that as “we go for­ward” Gov­ern­ment will en­sure ben­e­fits are had from the as­sign­ment. He said the changeover will be over in a cou­ple of weeks and busi­ness will re­turn to nor­mal.

As a se­cu­ri­ty re­sponse plan, Row­ley said there had been a need for se­cre­cy and if the changeover wasn’t on a need-to-know ba­sis, it wouldn’t have been doable and the ex­er­cise’s ben­e­fits would have been lost.

“Giv­en the com­plex­i­ty of the ex­er­cise, we’re quite sat­is­fied by and large we’ve done very well,” he said.

Row­ley said the sit­u­a­tion was go­ing “rel­a­tive­ly smooth­ly”. He said he wasn’t sur­prised by the ini­tial rush and had not­ed com­plaints that it had been done at the wrong time and that the “old” bills wouldn’t be ac­cept­ed.

“We’ll mon­i­tor this and de­ter­mine how firm that wall is on De­cem­ber 31,” he said.

Re­spond­ing to com­plaints from To­ba­go, he said the Cen­tral Bank, which can re­deem notes, has a pro­vi­sion for those un­able to go to banks to change notes. He said there’s ad­e­quate pro­vi­sion of new bills at banks but one of the biggest prob­lems en­coun­tered was that some peo­ple had is­sues with de­clar­ing their source of funds.

Row­ley said the poly­mer note is a su­pe­ri­or prod­uct com­pared to the pa­per note and will be more dif­fi­cult to copy.

“But we can’t say it will nev­er be coun­ter­feit­ed,” he said.