Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo has hit back at for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Vish­nu Dhan­paul, ac­cus­ing him and the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) of at­tempt­ing to “sab­o­tage the re­vival of the coun­try,” fol­low­ing Dhan­paul’s warn­ing that T&T could be head­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) giv­en the cur­rent state of the econ­o­my.

Speak­ing at a me­dia con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, Dhan­paul sug­gest­ed that the Gov­ern­ment’s fis­cal man­age­ment could trig­ger fur­ther cred­it down­grades and eco­nom­ic in­sta­bil­i­ty, cau­tion­ing that the up­com­ing na­tion­al bud­get could wors­en the sit­u­a­tion.

“When you start to look at re­serves and you start to look at bal­ance of pay­ments sup­port, there is on­ly one agency you can call when you need bal­ance of pay­ment sup­port. In May 2025, the net of­fi­cial re­serve stood at $5.093 bil­lion, but for some strange rea­son, by Au­gust 2025, it had de­clined dras­ti­cal­ly to $4.6 bil­lion.”