Pull the Bill and come again.
That was the call made by Opposition Member of Parliament for St. Joseph, Dale Marshall, as he led the Opposition’s reply on an amendment to the Barbados Revenue Authority Bill, which he described as unconstitutional.
He challenged that Government would have to go to Court in order to get the Bill passed.
Exhorting that the Opposition will not be supporting the legislation, which was led off by Minister of Finance, Christopher Sinckler, in the Lower Chamber, the former Attorney General said the amendment “will destroy the financing community in Barbados, stop people from selling land, removing all of those attributes of a modern society that Barbados has claimed as our own”.
According to Marshall, “There is substantial merit in an argument that this Bill is unconstitutional. Several statutes specifically state that the money due to those statutes shall be charges on land. If you tie a transaction with land to a tax clearance certificate, where the statute doesn’t say that it is a charge on the land, you are de facto making that particular statute and the debt under it the charge on the same land.”
He said this would essentially be creating a further charge on the land, and stressed that the law would have to say so specifically.
It is against this backdrop and pointing out the burden it will place on landowners, he said: “It is not too late to recognise that you are about to make a grievous error. Pull the Bill; come again. But if you need to save face, go to Select Committee and discuss it. But we maintain that it is uncon-stitutional and it must get the sanction of the two-thirds of this Parliament and be so certified to pass, and we will not be giving it our fiat,” he reiterated.
He suggested that the Minister of Finance should have sought legal counsel on the matter, and also take the matter to the commercial banks, realtors and real estate developers and as well as the wider Barbadian public through Town Hall meetings.
“This Bill is very far from perfect. Because it is based on a fundamentally wrong principle which says that you should get every penny you can out of everybody who has to pay the Government, no matter what it takes.” (JH)