Gail Alexan­der

The Op­po­si­tion’s shad­ow min­is­ter of fi­nance, Dave Tan­coo, has ac­cused Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert of “duck­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty” in the is­sue with the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al., as he point­ed out the au­dit­ed fi­nan­cials for T&T’s 2023 ac­counts re­main “in­com­plete.”

Tan­coo is­sued a state­ment on the mat­ter yes­ter­day, af­ter Im­bert ex­plained on Wednes­day that there was no “miss­ing mon­ey” from the 2023 ac­counts, as the Op­po­si­tion and its leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar had claimed. Im­bert de­tailed how the $2.6 bil­lion was dis­cov­ered late for sub­mis­sion to the 2023 ac­counts to the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al due to a new Cen­tral Bank sys­tem, trig­ger­ing the is­sue. Im­bert said the Trea­sury has con­firmed that all rev­enue col­lect­ed for 2023 has since been ac­count­ed for.

But Tan­coo said, “Mr Im­bert’s at­tempt to lim­it his role in this fi­as­co to his in­ap­pro­pri­ate per­son­al call to the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al is du­plic­i­tous, dan­ger­ous and open­ly de­cep­tive. It was Colm Im­bert who used Par­lia­men­tary cov­er on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions to en­gage in a vi­cious at­tack on the char­ac­ter and in­tegri­ty of Ms Jai­wantie Ram­dass, the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al. He was aid­ed and abet­ted by the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, who re­peat­ed and sup­port­ed Im­bert’s as­sault.

“Im­bert’s me­dia re­lease ne­glect­ed to men­tion the fact that he was forced to drop his own case against the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al be­cause it lacked le­gal mer­it and had no hope of suc­cess in the courts. In­stead, he seeks to ob­fus­cate the is­sue with an ir­rel­e­vant ex­pla­na­tion of bud­get­ing process, com­plete­ly un­re­lat­ed to the fact that to date, bil­lions are still miss­ing from the ac­counts of the coun­try, as a re­sult of which, the au­dit­ed fi­nan­cials for 2023 re­main in­com­plete,” Tan­coo claimed.

Last week, the Cab­i­net de­cid­ed to scrap the as­pects of the probe in­to the han­dling of a mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of rev­enue in the na­tion­al ac­counts re­lat­ed to Au­di­tor Gen­er­al Ram­dass.

How­ev­er, Tan­coo claimed the coun­try’s ac­counts re­main in­com­plete.

He called on Im­bert to say what le­gal ad­vice he re­lied on in the “at­tack” on the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al, who were/are the lawyers pro­vid­ing ad­vice, how much were they paid, the es­ti­mat­ed over­all cost to the tax­pay­er and how much of this cost will be borne by Im­bert.