Chester Sam­bra­no

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert says Gov­ern­ment plans to spend up to $6 bil­lion as part of its COVID-19 re­lief ef­fort.

He gave the break­down dur­ing yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 news con­fer­ence as he at­tempt­ed to clear up what he called “mis­in­for­ma­tion in the sys­tem” on what Gov­ern­ment is do­ing to pro­vide as­sis­tance dur­ing the pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od.

He said Gov­ern­ment has so far spent $934 mil­lion through its var­i­ous min­istries and agen­cies. The bulk of the spend­ing came from his min­istry.

He ex­plained that funds were spent on salary re­lief, a cred­it union agree­ment, Val­ued Added Tax (VAT) re­funds, bonds, face masks, the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly and the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty.

“We have fur­ther pro­vi­sions for To­ba­go in due course,” he said.

He added that they have al­so se­cured a US$65 mil­lion loan to as­sist the state-owned Caribbean Air­lines, which has been se­vere­ly hit by closed bor­ders world­wide.

“As you would re­alise, Caribbean Air­lines is earn­ing no mon­ey at this time,” Im­bert said, adding ad­di­tion­al sup­port for WASA is al­so be­ing looked at right now.

He said the much talked about small and medi­um busi­ness sec­tor was al­so a fea­ture for fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance. Im­bert said Gov­ern­ment is “in the fi­nal stages of a loan pro­gramme” where it will sub­sidise the in­ter­est and pro­vide some sort of guar­an­tee for those in that brack­et and some $300 mil­lion has been al­lo­cat­ed for this mea­sure.

“It’s for pay­roll sup­port, it’s to keep peo­ple in jobs, it is to al­low them to re­main in busi­ness,” he said.

He said the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices has spent $98.1 mil­lion to date on its range of so­cial pro­grammes, which in­clude food cards, cash sup­port cards, school feed­ing food cards, rental as­sis­tance and in­come as­sis­tance.

The min­istry lead­ing the COVID-19 fight, the Min­istry of Health, has so far utilised $55 mil­lion but Im­bert said, “if there is an in­crease in cas­es, God for­bid, then the min­istry would have to spend some more mon­ey.”

In this re­gard, he said an ad­di­tion­al pro­vi­sion of 250 mil­lion would be made avail­able.

“We are giv­ing Health every cent they need.”

The Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture has al­so used $1.3 mil­lion to en­sure fresh pro­duce, “and that fig­ure may ac­tu­al­ly go up in terms of in­creas­ing the amount of fresh pro­duce avail­able.”

Oth­er monies were spent by the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty - $3.7 mil­lion, Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter—10 mil­lion, Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment—$13.9 mil­lion and the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice - $5.3 mil­lion.

Im­bert knocked what he called un­rea­son­able re­quests from some quar­ters in so­ci­ety, for ex­am­ple for the waiv­ing of tax­es and wa­ter and elec­tric­i­ty rates. He said if this was done, “it just means that the trea­sury will have to put out more.”

How­ev­er, he is con­vinced the Gov­ern­ment will be able to fund the COVID-19 mea­sures and the over­all bud­get.

“We are sat­is­fied, on prop­er ex­am­i­na­tion of all that is avail­able, that there is more than ad­e­quate fi­nanc­ing avail­able to cov­er both the bud­get deficit and debt ser­vic­ing,” Im­bert said.

“I don’t think we’ll have any dif­fi­cul­ty at all, we’ve been do­ing our home­work for the last month.”

In April of this year, Im­bert re­vised the fis­cal deficit due to the hit ex­pect­ed from COVID-19 and the fall in in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy prices.

The deficit was orig­i­nal­ly es­ti­mat­ed at $5.3 bil­lion but is now ex­pect­ed to ex­pand to $15.5 bil­lion.