Who is Government’s lobbyist?
That’s the question which Opposition MP Roodal Moonilal wants Government to answer after Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley spoke about T&T needing a lobbyist.
Rowley did so on Thursday during debate on the FATCA legislation in Parliament.
Noting that T&T was making world news for “the wrong reasons,” Rowley said T&T needed a lobbyist to open doors for the country and to have the correct impression of T&T conveyed.
But Rowley said no lobbyist was influenced last Sunday’s call from US President Donald Trump and T&T wasn’t paying for Caricom’s lobby on de-risking of banks since Caricom’s secretariat was funding this.
Yesterday, however, Moonilal said he wants to know “who is Government’s lobbyist, what they’re paid for or going to be paid for? It can’t be to make T&T look good when the daily front pages are always about murder.”
Office of the Prime Minister officials didn’t reply yesterday on queries about the identity of the lobbyist.
Despite unanimous passage of the FATCA legislation, Moonilal accused Government of being deceptive on the issue and stalling the process, since he said there had been state correspondence to the US since last September that the Joint Select Committee scrutiny of the legislation—which the Opposition had repeatedly requested—would be done.
Finance Minister Colm Imbert had initially announced the JSC would be done, but Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi had later said the legislation would only have been examined by MPs in the Lower House.
The Opposition had insisted on the JSC, but it was not done until earlier this year after debate stalled.
“We could have completed the JSC process and FATCA a long time ago, since last year, if Government had fulfilled its promise to have the JSC as it told the US it would have done,” Moonilal said.