The Pris­ons Ser­vice is get­ting sup­port from the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency (SSA) with elec­tron­ic mea­sures to as­sist in pre­vent­ing in­mates from “call­ing hits” from with­in prison walls.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds gave this in­for­ma­tion in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day re­ply­ing to Op­po­si­tion MP Rod­ney Charles’ queries about elec­tron­ic mea­sures to pre­vent re­port­ed “hit call­ing” from “in­side”.

Hinds said the Prison sys­tem al­so has hand-held de­tec­tors at its nine lo­ca­tions.

He said Gov­ern­ment had oth­er mea­sures in place but Charles and his friends in the UNC had dis­man­tled all when they en­tered gov­ern­ment.

He said due to the se­cu­ri­ty na­ture of the is­sue in­volv­ing the pris­ons, he couldn’t give more de­tails but he ac­cused Charles of seek­ing in­for­ma­tion to ex­pose what the Gov­ern­ment was do­ing on its se­cu­ri­ty of sys­tems. He al­so said the re­la­tion­ship with the Prison Of­fi­cers As­so­ci­a­tion had “con­tin­ued to get bet­ter”.

On a query about re­mov­ing T&T as the on­ly coun­try on the Eu­ro­pean Union’s list of non-co­op­er­a­tive ju­ris­dic­tions for tax pur­pos­es, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said he wrote the EU this week on re­mov­ing T&T to a grey list this year.

He said he and the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al were work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly on this and to have T&T deemed ful­ly com­pli­ant as soon as pos­si­ble.