Imbert: Opposition MPs spreading misinformation

Finance Minister Colm Imbert said there are no conditionalities attached to loans to TT from any multilateral funding agencies, and Opposition MPs are carrying out political mischief in suggesting otherwise.

He said the government has no intention of entering into any loan agreement that would impose austerity or any other adverse conditionality on the people of TT.

In a release, Imbert said over the last month Opposition MPs have been spreading false, inaccurate, misleading, and deliberately scandalous information regarding the government’s relationship with multilateral funding agencies, such as the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and CAF– Development Bank of Latin America.

He said Couva South MP Rudranath Indarsingh had falsely claimed that the World Bank had instructed the Government to retrench 33 per cent of public-sector workers, which Imbert immediately debunked. He said the World Bank has given no such instructions to the government, or any instructions of any kind whatsoever, as a condition of a loan for covid19 relief, or any other loan.

Imbert went on to say that Caroni Central MP Arnold Ram had not only repeated Indarsingh’s lie, but made further false claims about loan agreements with multilateral funding agencies, at a media conference on Sunday.

He said Ram was calling on government to disclose the terms of loan agreements made with the IDB and CAF, which Ram said were referred to in the Cabinet sub-committee report on the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) laid in Parliament last Friday.

“Despite the fact that no such loan agreements exist, Ram has questioned whether the proposed restructuring at WASA was as a result of the terms of these alleged loan agreements, when the reality is that all the WASA report said was that preliminary discussions have been held with the IDB and CAF regarding possible future technical assistance and possible future loan financing for the modernisation and improvement of WASA.

“In other words, Opposition MPs have now resorted to making up their own Anansi stories about important matter of public interest, and then commenting on their own fictional and imaginary scenarios.”

Imbert said that for the record, he wished to confirm that “there are no such conditionalities attached to any loans from the IDB, World Bank or CAF or any other multilateral funding agency. The Government is not in an IMF programme of any kind and has no intention of entering into any loan agreement that would impose austerity or any other adverse conditionality on the people of TT.”