The COP leader, who holds the finance portfolio in the PP cabinet, commended Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar for taking the legislation to Parliament.
He also spoke about the CLICO and Hindu Credit Union (HCU) issues, Dookeran said that he is prepared to "get tears today, and applause tomorrow” in dealing with thoese matters. “The Government did what was justly right in dealing with these two thorny matters,” he told his party.
With respect to the HCU, Dookeran said the government has allocated about $300 million to deal with that issue.
“The government’s decision to deal with the depositors of HCU who have been denied their rights to that deposit and we have allocated something in the order of $300 million to handle that issue and the Deposit Insurance Corporation is now engaged in putting the machinery in place to make it happen, so that’s another aspect of clearing the clouds which we inherited,” he said.
Dookeran said these measures are among others being announced or in the pipeline that would lay a solid foundation for strong economic and development programs in the future.
He indicated that the Inter-American Development Bank(IADB) would meet later this week to finalise the US$140 million loan, which is part of an overall loan aimed at giving a new lease to the economic life of our country, which he said would take Trinidad and Tobago “away from the point of strangulation.”
Dookeran said that the IADB loan to T&T is unprecedented in the Bank’s lending policy with regards to its approval time and the rate of interest of 1.75 per cent.
He further said that when the People’s Partnership Government came in power last May, its first premise was to clean up the balance sheet, clear up the clouds and set the platform for economic growth.
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