Dhanpaul: PNM contributed to EU delisting

An­drea Perez-Sobers
Se­nior Re­porter
an­[email protected]

For­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Vish­nu Dhan­paul has chal­lenged the Gov­ern­ment's por­tray­al of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s re­cent re­moval from the Eu­ro­pean Union’s tax black­list, ar­gu­ing that the achieve­ment re­flects years of tech­ni­cal en­gage­ment rather than the work of the past ten months.

Speak­ing Wednes­day at a news con­fer­ence called by the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment, Dhan­paul point­ed to the Eu­ro­pean Union’s own me­dia re­lease, which states that the mile­stone “re­flects sev­er­al years of sus­tained com­mit­ment, con­struc­tive di­a­logue and close co­op­er­a­tion be­tween the Min­istry of Fi­nance and the Eu­ro­pean Union au­thor­i­ties.”

He not­ed that the state­ment makes no ref­er­ence to a ten-month time­frame and em­pha­sised that a key re­form in­volved re­plac­ing the for­mer Free Trade Zone regime, pre­vi­ous­ly deemed harm­ful, with a Spe­cial Eco­nom­ic Zone frame­work aligned to in­ter­na­tion­al­ly agreed stan­dards for tax gov­er­nance.

Dhan­paul al­so cred­it­ed for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert for en­gage­ment with EU as­ses­sors, ref­er­enc­ing an Oc­to­ber 25, 2024, meet­ing with an as­sess­ment team to con­firm the Gov­ern­ment’s po­lit­i­cal and ad­min­is­tra­tive sup­port, fol­lowed by high-lev­el dis­cus­sions in Paris the fol­low­ing week.

Turn­ing to the cap­i­tal mar­kets, he dis­missed claims that the re­cent­ly is­sued US dol­lar bond, which was two times over­sub­scribed at a 6.5 per cent coupon rate, sig­nals strong in­vestor con­fi­dence. He de­scribed that char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion as “ab­solute rub­bish.”

By com­par­i­son, Dhan­paul re­called that in 2014, un­der a UNC ad­min­is­tra­tion, a US$550 mil­lion bond priced at 4.5 per cent was 11 times over­sub­scribed. In 2016, he added, a US$1 bil­lion bond at the same 4.5 per cent rate at­tract­ed sub­scrip­tions three times over.

In his as­sess­ment, stronger over­sub­scrip­tion lev­els at low­er coupon rates in pre­vi­ous years sug­gest a more favourable in­vestor re­sponse than the most re­cent is­sue, chal­leng­ing the nar­ra­tive that the cur­rent bond per­for­mance re­flects broad-based con­fi­dence in the econ­o­my.

Dhan­paul al­so ad­dressed the Gov­ern­ment’s pro­posed eco­nom­ic re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion plan, ob­serv­ing that this coun­try re­mains the on­ly small is­land en­er­gy-ex­port­ing, en­er­gy-pro­duc­ing democ­ra­cy in the world, which is a dis­tinc­tion, he ar­gued, that should frame any se­ri­ous dis­cus­sion about fis­cal strat­e­gy and long-term growth.