Senate rejects Opposition on procurement order, Imbert alleges ‘hidden agenda’ to ruin country

FINANCE Minister Colm Imbert on Tuesday in the Senate lamented an alleged “hidden agenda” to “grind the country to a halt.”

He spoke against an Opposition motion that proposed to remove exemptions to the Public Procurement and Disposal of Property Act 2015. One exemption was an order issued on September 8 to exclude his ministry’s procurement of financing services for the government or a public body from the remit of the act.

The Senate rejected the annulment by 17 votes to 11.

Imbert argued that debt-financing was a specialist area best run by his ministry.

Speaking after Opposition Senator Jayanti Lutchmedial who had moved the motion, Imbert accused her of histrionics in her presentation which he defined as “melodramatic behaviour designed to attract attention.”

He alleged, “Members opposite are experts at gaslighting.”

Imbert said his ministry’s Debt Management Division had a unique expertise to manage public debt which, by law, must be reported to Parliament yearly.

He said the World Bank had praised TT as an outlier for its provision of social welfare, free education, disability allowance and free medication.

He said TT spends $1 billion yearly on free medication but said much of that acquisition was done by debt-financing.

“You don’t want bunching of debt.

“Public debt management is a highly specialised area. There is no room for amateurs in this.”

He reiterated that it was his ministry, not state enterprises, that had the training and expertise to handle debt management.

Imbert said, “We account to the Parliament, not just in the documents we lay but we are available to answer questions.”

He said under the act, the 2023 order could only have been made by way of his ministry being able to persuade the Procurement Regulator.

Imbert said while the Government had been undertaking certain bureaucracy and making its case to the Procurement Regulator to agree to the 2023 order, two State entities had tried to arrange Government-guaranteed borrowings.

“I can tell you it was total chaos. They simply didn’t know what to do and they simply did not have the expertise.”

He said the institutions risked having financial institutions running rings around them, as experts dealing with amateurs.

Imbert advocated for the order by recalling another recent case where the Government had to quickly step in to supply financial help.

“There was one in particular where a very large bond which had been issued ten years before was maturing in September, raised by a state enterprise with a government guarantee under a previous administration.

“As September approached and we began to ask the state enterprise whether they thought they could complete the transaction, do the tendering, evaluate the tender, select a suitable financial institution that had made the best proposal, then go through the process of drafting all those legal documents.”

Eventually his ministry realised they couldn’t administer it all.

“We were going to default on government debt in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

He said since TT’s independence in 1962, it had never defaulted on a debt.

“We had to move in. We had to solve that problem with cash, already appropriated and allocated for another purpose. We had to do it. We saved the day.”

Imbert said his ministry could do transactions with full integrity within three weeks, compared to nine months typically taken by state enterprises.

He rejected the annulment motion as “frivolous and wasteful.”