Plea Agreement bill returns to Senate on Tuesday

However, before the adjournment was taken, Minister of Agriculture Clarence Rambharat assured Opposition Senator Wade Mark that he was confident a new board will be appointed to the Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Committee. Rambharat was responding to an appeal by Mark speaking on a motion on the adjournment of the Senate, that the committee shut down on September 12, 2015 and since then, the Government had not appointed a new board.

Mark said without a board a number of projects, including 24 housing projects, had stalled and this was causing extreme hardship to the prospective homeowners in terms of the delivery of mortgages and deeds, and the distribution of empty lots. He said he didn’t know what the Government had against cane farmers and sugar workers, having closed down Caroni Green and Caroni 1975 Limited. Mark said there was no plausible reason for the Government not to act, adding that in 2016 the Government had allocated $8 million to the committee in the Public Sector Investment Programme and that money would be returned to the Consolidated Fund because of the absence of the board.

Rambharat responded that the committee was one of three paid for by the proceeds from the export of sugar and since 2003 this country had stopped exporting sugar whereupon the rationale and money for the funding of the committees had simply disappeared.

He said the People’s National Movement government had offered the workers of Caroni 1975 a VSE P package resulting in more than 8000 workers getting a two-acre lot and over 7,800 of them receiving residential lands.

Rambharat said the programme has so far cost taxpayers more than $10 billion.