Business chambers react to TT’s fall in corruption index

The nation’s CPI score, which measures perceptions of corruption within the public service by polling the opinions of business leaders and country experts and ranks 176 countries on a scale of one to 100, has slipped four points, from 39 in 2015, to 35 in 2016.

The lower the score, the more corrupt the country is perceived as being.

The country has also declined from its place at 72 in 2015, to a current ranking of 101 out of the 176 countries.

And commenting on the decline, Chaguanas Chamber of Industry and Commerce (CCIC) president, Richie Sookhai, said changes in both the mentality of the population as well as the enacting of anti-corruption legislation by government had to be expedited and not allowed to languish.

“It is unfortunate that we have actually dropped by a couple points down in the corruption perception index and this is exactly how the world is perceiving us currently, but we hope the measures that the current government have in place, which is like the anti-corruption legislation and the Whistle Blower Act, could be implemented soon and not held back because this will definitely not improve our perception index,” Sookhai said in a telephone interview last week.

“For a society with all our natural resources we should have progressed via infrastructure.

Instead, we have not used our resources to improve the society, we still have a lot of bureaucracy within the system and it is still about who you know before you can get something done,” he said.

“And this type of mentality needs to change. In some institutions that you go to, is all about who you know and whether or not a bribe is passed and allegations of bribes have been brought before the courts in the past and this is where the Whistle Blower Act and the anti-corruption legislation could, once in place, help stymie this whole process of corruption or bribe passing in Trinidad and Tobago.” Asked whether he believed that T&T’s society has a high tolerance for corruption, Sookhai said, “I think it has grown in our society for so long that it has become the norm, and the norm in the sense in the way we do business and this is unfortunate because when you have people who really want to do the right thing and walk the straight and narrow path, you have those who, to get anything done, sometimes you have to bend the rules and that is unfair.” In full agreement was Penal/Debe Chamber of Commerce (PDCC) president, Shiva Roopnarine, who noted that Trinidad and Tobago’s decline was part of a trend which had been taking place over the past few years and represented a lack of political will to deal with corruption by successive governments.

“This is a trend that we are seeing over the last couple of years and it is a sign of the government’s lack of will to correct a troubling situation, this is something that stems not only from the point of view of the government but State agencies as well, and it doesn’t augur well for our nation,” Roopnarine said.

“It’s the mentality of the society and what type of investors would we be attracting, whether we would be attracting ethical investors or unethical investors, serious business minded investors who want to develop the country, or investors who know they have to pass some money to get things done so as a country we have to understand and appreciate the type of people who would be willing to invest here in the perceived way to do business in Trinidad,” he said.

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