Business Minister, Dominic Gaskin has announced plans to resume the scrap metal trade in the coming days as the proposed bill to govern the sector remains on the laps of the Attorney General, Basil Williams.
He made the revelation on Thursday after an event who stated that he hopes to have the trade resumed for another limited period before the year ends.
“I know that we will try to do another limited resumption, that is how we will go ahead with it until such time that legislation will pass. We will assess the last resumption, I have a report which I haven’t completely examined as yet but one there are no red flags or problems, we can do it again” Gaskin said.
Gaskin said too that during the last limited resumption period, the Ministry was able to test the new software system.
“We were testing out our new software system that is designed to monitor the scrap metal trade and so far I think that they were a few little areas where we spotted some deficiencies that can easily be fixed so from that point I would say that it is successful, we have managed to test our systems and we do have the systems in place to properly monitor the trade” the Minister disclosed.
Government had approved a restart of the scrap metal trade in Guyana during February 2017 after closing down the industry one year prior to that.
The main reason for this was to allow exporters to ship out the existing stock for a three month period and ensure that there was no stockpile of the materials.
However, in April 2018, after several months of delays, Government had decided to reopen the scrap metal trade on a limited basis to facilitate the clearing of some of the accumulated scrap metal across the country.
