Independent senator Rolph Balgobin says there should be a police probe several questionable new businesses being established in T&T. He made the statement during his contribution to the debate on the Financial Intelligence (Amendment) Bill 2011 in the Senate yesterday. Balgobin did not say whether he had been referring to Chinese immigrants. But there has been an obvious influx of Chinese immigrants in T&T. The bill was presented for debate by Attorney General Anand Ramlogan.
Balgobin said the establishment of those businesses, including restaurants and groceries should be cause for great concern in these times of economic stagnation in the country. “Where are these people getting this money from? Restaurants, groceries...If you had to leave where you were living because of economic hardship and travel halfway around the world and come here as an economic migrant, how it is you have all this money?” he added. He said studies of immigration showed it took at least a generation or two before a family could generate enough money to launch a business the size and scale being established in T&T. “What do we see now with that? We see kidnapping, we see murder and there are international dimensions to these things,” he said. Balgobin said the FIU should be established to deal with such matters directly.
“That is why it is so important for us to get this thing (FIU) moving.” “Clearly many of these businesses have no clear source of funding and even more importantly, they do not have a sustainable business model,” he said. He said the businesses “are always empty but it (they) not closing down.” Balgobin said many of the businessmen “can’t speak the language, they haven’t even mastered the basics of the societies that they are operating in and you have a million-dollar business.” He said the FIU “needs to help law enforcement to target and identify these people and let us lock them up.”
He said development was sending the wrong message to young people who were studying hard to become successful business people in the future. He said it was not fair for those in the country who were working very hard to earn a living “and you just arrive here as a part of a criminal network and living large.” He recalled years ago, “if you went to a China shop, the China man, as we call them, running the shop would have been an elderly person (and) you would have addressed them (him) with respect and deference but now you have teenagers running these businesses.” He said while visiting one such shop recently, he witnessed a T&T national enter the business place and was told by the businessman, “I am not serving you, get out.” Balgobin asked: “Could I go and do that in their country?”
Earlier, Balgobin said terrorists were passing through T&T. Balgobin said terrorist funding networks were global. “It is not to say that money hasn’t passed through Trinidad and Tobago and it isn’t here now...That is not true,” he insisted. He said agencies like the FIU was needed “to get in there and catch come of those flows and at least try to strangle or slow down the flow of some of this kind of money.” He added: “Terrorism is real, very real, especially for small countries.” Balgobin said it remained “quite easy to bring something into Tobago and just put it on the ferry and bring it across, and guess what, that happens.” He said that was not a secret.
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