A Port-of-Spain businesswoman and three female employees demonstrated outside the Central Bank yesterday, claiming the Central Bank was not releasing sufficient US dollars to commercial banks.
Managing director of Vision Headgear Ltd, Mary Ramlogan, said the 30 employees of her small manufacturing company were in jeopardy because there was insufficient US currency to pay for goods from China. The company imports from China to produce belts, handbags and schoolbags. She said this August period was supposed to be her biggest for sales and she was awaiting the arrival of two containers of material from China but had no US currency to pay for the material.
Ramlogan added: “We are facing a crisis because we cannot pay our suppliers from China for the goods we import.
“We have loans and other bills to pay and the US$1,000 being released to us is insufficient,” Ramlogan added.
She said the businessmen in China did not accept credit card payments.
Ramlogan said she wanted to deliver a letter to the Central Bank’s governor and, in a release she issued to the media, called on Jwala Rambarran and other directors to resign.
But the Central Bank, in its response yesterday, said since the start of the year it had supported the market with US$1.4 billion and for the corresponding period last year it sold US$865 million.
The Central Bank said for the first seven months of this year, US$3 billion came to the market in supply, while the demand was US$4.3 billion
It added that for the corresponding period in 2014 the inflows were US$3.2 billion, while demand was US$4 billion.
The Central Bank said for this year to July 31 “inflows dropped by $300 million while demand increased by US$360 million dollars.”
The bank said it had met the shortfall and had put “US$524 million more into the market this year than last year.”
It said for the first week in this month, it sold an additional US$30 million, which was not included in the previous total for up to July 31.
The Central Bank said its intervention “is at the system level. We are never involved in or dictate how commercial banks allocate their funds and our FX sales to their customers. This is strictly a matter between commercial banks and their customers.”