During a public sitting of the Standing Finance Committee on Friday, Trinidad and Tobago’s Finance Minister Davendranath Tancoo faced rigorous cross-examination from opposition Members of Parliament over drastically revised public expenditure estimates, unspent multi-million-dollar allocations for critical social and economic programmes, and a steep proposed budget for contracted services under the ministry’s Investments Division.
The most eye-popping adjustment disclosed was the revised fiscal 2026 provision for court judgments issued against the State, which has ballooned to $140 million – a 147% jump from the initial 2026 allocation of just $57 million, and nearly 2.5 times the $56.5 million in actual disbursements for such judgments recorded in the 2025 fiscal year. Responding to queries from Port of Spain North/St Ann’s West Opposition MP Stuart Young, Tancoo committed to furnishing a full, itemized written breakdown of all pending court cases, formal judicial orders, and individual payout amounts tied to the $140 million line item at a later date.
Colm Imbert, Opposition MP for Diego Martin North East, followed up with a deeper line of inquiry that exposed an equally staggering surge in High Court cost awards: the revised 2026 estimate for this line now sits at $15.4 million, a more than 3,550% increase from the $421,000 spent in 2025 and 22 times the original 2026 allocation of $700,000. Tancoo noted that forecasting such payouts is inherently unreliable due to the unpredictable timing and scale of judicial rulings, and reiterated he would share a full breakdown of these cost payments in writing as well. Imbert also flagged that the subsequent 2027 fiscal year’s allocation for state court judgments had been cut by half to $70 million, prompting questions about the realism of that downward revision.
Attention then shifted to a seemingly anomalous budget line under the Ministry of Finance’s Investments Division: a proposed $36 million allocation for other contracted services in 2027, a dramatic upswing from the $100,000 revised 2026 estimate and the mere $22,118 in actual 2025 spending for the same category. Imbert pressed Tancoo to explain the near-36,000% year-over-year projected increase, questioning how the ministry planned to ramp up spending so drastically in 12 months. Tancoo framed the spike as a long-overdue push to clear a backlog of dormant state-owned entities that have remained on government books for decades, citing the decades-long pending wind-up of defunct carrier BWIA West Indies Airways Ltd and the recently added CEPEP Company Ltd as key targets for the initiative. He added that the contracted services would cover third-party investigations, auditing, and relevant staff training alongside state entity dissolution processes, but acknowledged that no consultants had been shortlisted to date and no formal scopes of work had been finalized for the planned spending.
The committee then turned its scrutiny to a string of high-priority programmes that have recorded zero or partial spending despite public announcements of their intended rollout. A $475 million employment fund launched in the prior budget, marketed as a lifeline for retrenched CEPEP workers and other jobseekers, had registered no disbursements at all in the current 2026 fiscal year. Tancoo explained the fund had been administratively transferred to the Ministry of Works and Transport and the Ministry of Rural Development, but did not address Imbert’s pointed query about why the government had failed to spend any of the funds after previously citing pending legislative changes as the cause of delays. A separate $10 million programme earmarked for small and micro-enterprise support also recorded zero expenditure for 2026, with Tancoo confirming the initiative is still in pre-implementation stages and will only roll out in full in the 2027 fiscal year after all regulatory requirements are met.
Finally, the committee reviewed the $1.4 billion original allocation for the 2026 Infrastructure Development Fund, of which only roughly $850 million has been disbursed, leaving an unspent balance of $553 million. Tancoo attributed the unspent sum to widespread bottlenecks in public procurement processes, a challenge he said he had flagged explicitly during the initial 2026 budget presentation. The session closed with confirmation that the full Ministry of Finance budget for the upcoming 2027 fiscal year totals $5.27 billion.
State’s court judgment bill jumps to $140m
