Kamla buffs Rowley over ‘sham’ remark

THE Opposition Leader chided the Prime Minister for describing their meeting as “sham” in his speech at a People’s National Movement meeting in Port of Spain the night before he was due to meet her on the Income Tax (Amendment) Bill 2018.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar, at a briefing in the parliamentary chamber today, said she scolded Dr Rowley by asking him why were they bothering to meet if he decided beforehand it was all a sham. Saying it was a "dark day" as Petrotrin’s light went out with thousands being laid off work, she alluded that the bill was being pushed as a distraction from the oil company’s shutdown. “The economic calamity and catastrophe is not with the passage of the bill but with the death and closure of Petrotrin.”

Unlike previous claims by the Government of a November 30 deadline to pass the bill, Persad-Bissessar said Rowley had earlier told her that today was not the deadline. Asked what is the bill’s deadline, she said reporters should ask Rowley. “What the Prime Minister said this morning is that it is a ‘moving pavement’ and therefore it keeps changing and there is something called a peer review and that may well be in January of next year.”

Saying, at Thursday midnight, she had received a 96-page report which includes amendments to the bill, she declared, “We will not be rushed into passing bad law.”

Persad-Bissessar said TT is already on a blacklist. “We are committed to passing law that will take us off the blacklist. We are on a blacklist. I don’t know why people don’t understand that.”

Persad-Bissessar said at a meeting of the Special Select Committee on the bill, no-one could give details of two banks that had purportedly lost their correspondent banks over legislative delays. “The Government is chaining up and fear mongering the people. The reason for that is today is the dramatic day when they have shut down Petrotrin.

“I travel that road often. Petrotrin is a landmark. It is 101 years old, built in 1917.”

Asked the way forward, she recalled Finance Minister Colm Imbert saying the bill is one of three intertwined bills and she urged they be dealt with together.

She said all three bills were originally before the JSC but the tax bill was pulled out as a ploy for fast-tracking. All three should go back to the JSC for proper review and harmonisation, she urged.

“We are committed to passing good law. We are committed to complying with the Global Forum, but this is not the pathway to go.

“There is time to do this thing properly and not rush it through.”

Persad-Bissessar said the bill’s eventual passage will not take TT off a blacklist it is now on, and so TT is “spinning top in mud”, with the Government trying to frighten people. She again urged all three bills be debated together, at leisure, rather an MPs fighting down each other.