KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Sept. 18, 2014, CNS – Opposition Leader Arnhim Eustace does not think St. Vincent and the Grenadines is making the best use of PetroCaribe funds.
“When you get those kinds of soft money you should not use it for recurrent expenditure like paying salaries,” he told Caribbean News Service (CNS).
“You should use it for investment purposes to create jobs in the society. That is where the focus should be when you have that sort of money coming but if you use it to pay salaries and so on it’s gone.
“Our debt now to Petrocaribe is about $60 million and what do we see for it; what investment is there that we can see? Nothing,” he said.
There are 17 beneficiary members of PetroCaribe of which 12 are Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries, including The Bahamas, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and Suriname.
The smaller territories of Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts-Nevis, and St Vincent and the Grenadines are also members.
He pointed to a report by Scotiabank under the heading, Petrocaribe, a noose or a lifeline?; and articulated that he has always believed it was the former.
“A lot of our deficit in St. Vincent now can be tied to the Petrocaribe deal,” he explained.
But Eustace is not opposed to St. Vincent and the Grenadines remaining a member of PetroCaribe under his leadership.
“When somebody tells you that if the oil price goes above a certain figure you can keep back 50 per cent and we will give you a loan at two per cent over 25 years you jump at that,” he said.
“But nothing undermines fiscal discipline than when governments find it possible to get money on easy terms. They don’t take the steps that they should take to contain their fiscal deficit and therefore they are impacting negatively on the whole economy.”
Eustace who is hoping to replace Dr. Ralph Gonsalves as prime minister of this country said there was better management of the economy under his New Democratic Party (NDP).
“When the NDP was in office for 17 years we had a current account surplus of 5.28 percent of GDP. That was the average. We never had a current deficit.”
CNS/ml/2014
