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For­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Vish­nu Dhan­paul has chal­lenged the Gov­ern­ment's por­tray­al of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s re­cent re­moval from the Eu­ro­pean Union’s tax black­list, ar­gu­ing that the achieve­ment re­flects years of tech­ni­cal en­gage­ment rather than the work of the past ten months.

Speak­ing Wednes­day at a news con­fer­ence called by the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment, Dhan­paul point­ed to the Eu­ro­pean Union’s own me­dia re­lease, which states that the mile­stone “re­flects sev­er­al years of sus­tained com­mit­ment, con­struc­tive di­a­logue and close co­op­er­a­tion be­tween the Min­istry of Fi­nance and the Eu­ro­pean Union au­thor­i­ties.”

He not­ed that the state­ment makes no ref­er­ence to a ten-month time­frame and em­pha­sised that a key re­form in­volved re­plac­ing the for­mer Free Trade Zone regime, pre­vi­ous­ly deemed harm­ful, with a Spe­cial Eco­nom­ic Zone frame­work aligned to in­ter­na­tion­al­ly agreed stan­dards for tax gov­er­nance.