00:00The Minister of Finance does not distribute foreign exchange.
00:03I don't have a pool of foreign exchange in my office, or in this building, or in the Treasury, where
00:10when someone requires foreign exchange, they apply it to the Minister of Finance, or the Pwner Secretary in Finance, or anything like that.
00:17That's not how it's done.
00:18Finance Minister Colm Imbert speaking during a virtual media conference on Tuesday,
00:23following his announcement on Sunday that the Ex-Im Bank Forex window for the importation of essential items
00:29has been resumed after careful review.
00:32When taxes are paid in U.S. dollars,
00:35they go into a special account at the Central Bank, and that constitutes
00:42the country's or the government's foreign reserves, so that that's how we earn U.S. dollars.
00:48The Finance Minister said Trinidad and Tobago also gets U.S. dollars when the government borrows from
00:53institutions such as multilateral
00:56international agencies. He then explained how the Forex distribution system works in an apparent response to the declaration
01:04by the opposition and several local business owners that there is a foreign exchange crisis in Trinidad and Tobago.
01:11Let's say the Central Bank
01:13distributes 100 million U.S. dollars
01:16every two to three weeks to the commercial banks. One may be the largest bank,
01:20maybe the Republic might get 20% of that,
01:24so 20 million, and then FCB might get 15 million,
01:29Scotia might get 17 million. It all depends on the size of the bank, the number of customers it has, the number of branches it has.
01:36It's a formula. On Sunday, Opposition MP Devendranath Thanku
01:41spoke about what he said was the Finance Ministry's response to a letter from the attorney of the owner and founder of
01:48Ramsaram Dairy Products on the distribution of Forex.
01:52What this means is that there is no official policy that deals with the allocation of foreign exchange to businesses and
02:00individuals.
02:01The status quo works for the PNM and their friends, family and financiers at the expense of you
02:09ordinary citizens and genuine businesses in this country. While no mention was made of the opposition on Tuesday,
02:15a question was posed to the Finance Minister about whether he had any proof that the commercial banks are making Forex
02:23available to their preferred customers. Under the Financial Institutions Act,
02:29it would be an offense for a bank to tell me
02:35how much Forex they're giving the customers.
02:38So I'm afraid I'm unable to get that information. I can ask the central bank to look into it.
02:45But even they would not be able to tell me in any
02:49specific way because they'd be breaking the law as well.
02:52The Finance Minister explained that the central bank's regular foreign exchange
02:57intervention gives preference to trade followed by medical expenses and overseas tuition for students studying abroad.
03:05The category that would not receive
03:08any kind of preference at all is if some, for example, somebody wanted to buy a condominium in Mayan, they would hardly ever
03:15get part of that
03:18distribution going into the commercial banks. It's an honor system.
03:21The Finance Minister said the government can, in his words, go to the extreme, which he said it has not done yet in
03:30particularizing whether a percentage of the foreign exchange goes to specific categories.
03:36So we are going to talk to the Chambers of Commerce, the TGMA, and various other interest groups and ask them
03:43whether they believe this honor system that has been
03:46enforced for the last 25 years
03:49should change into a more regulated and a more structured thing,
03:53whereby the central bank would now have categories of
03:58distribution for foreign exchange. The Finance Minister said those talks would include the Tobago Chamber of Commerce and that he expects
04:05he will be able to complete those discussions maybe by the end of this year.
04:10Joel Brown, TV6 News.
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