Moonilal: Venezuelan money in TT?

OROPOUCHE East MP Dr Roodal Moonilal wants to know if the Venezuelan government has any properties or financial instruments (including cash in any financial investment or institution) in TT.

Moonilal will ask Finance Minister Colm Imbert this question when the House of Representatives sits on Friday. Moonilal will also ask Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi to inform the House about any additional money spent on the Clico and Hindu Credit Union Commission of Enquiry from October 1, 2016 to the present.

The main item on the House’s agenda will be the Companies Amendment Bill 2018. The bill was introduced in the House last November by Al-Rawi. The purpose of the bill is to amend 11 clauses of the Companies Act. One of the amendments would require a company, within a year of this act coming into force and regularly afterwards, to ascertain all the beneficial owners holding an interest in it. The amendment will also look at whether the person held the interest prior to or after the act came into force.

The bill also states it would be an offence for a company not to take all reasonable steps to ascertain and obtain this information and knowingly and recklessly file a return with the registrar. In such circumstances, a company, its directors and officers would be liable on summary conviction to a fine of $10,000, imprisonment for three years and an additional $300 fine for every day the offence continues.

Every person who acquires a beneficial interest in the shares of a company, and whose name is not entered in the register of members of the company as a shareholder, is required to make a statutory declaration within 30 days of acquiring that interest. That declaration is supposed to include the particulars of the person in whose name the shares are registered in the company’s books, the date on which the beneficial interest was created and other particulars which may be prescribed.

Failure to submit such a declaration is an offence. On summary conviction an offender is liable to a fine of $10,000, imprisonment for three years and an additional $300 fine for every day the offence continues.