(Trinidad Express) State carrier Caribbean Airlines Ltd is being restructured, Trade Minister Vasant Bharath said yesterday.
Speaking at yesterday’s post-Cabinet news conference at the Prime Minister’s office, St Clair, he said the airline was running its London Gatwick service twice a week at between 75 and 85 per cent load factors and an additional flight was being added because of the demand and because British Airways had withdrawn one of its flights to Trinidad and Tobago.
“Caribbean Airlines is being restructured and re-looked at, its routes, its profitability as well as the entire integration process with Air Jamaica,” he said.
He noted there had been an issue with the flying of Caribbean Airlines jets with the Air Jamaica logo and this matter was now solved.
“We can now fly Caribbean Airlines jets with Air Jamaica paraphernalia particularly to the Jamaican diaspora provided we say that it is an Air Jamaica flight operated under licence by Caribbean Airlines,” he said.
Bharath said CAL’s fuel subsidy issue which runs at about “quarter of a billion dollars” was still to be worked out.
“We would be looking at those very intensely right after the Budget,” he said.
Bharath said the restructuring of CAL would be done from a management as well as an operational capacity perspective.
He said some new planes — Boeing 767s — had arrived recently.
He added that one ATR aircraft had arrived last week from France and another was to come in October.
He said four of the nine ATRs were cancelled.
The Minister also spoke about making Trinidad and Tobago more competitive in terms of attracting investment. Noting that this country was ranked 74th in the world in terms of the number of days its takes to set up a business (because it took 43 days), he said the Cabinet yesterday approved a note for the rationalisation of the procedures for establishing a business. He said the two main changes involved the National Insurance Board and Board of Inland Revenue which took 30 days to do checks and issue BIR numbers. Now, a business can start trading anywhere between one and three days as opposed to 43 days. Applications to both institutions would be able to be done online, he added.
