Last night you saw the Labor Ministry's CEO confirm that the change in trade license regime would be postponed. Today the PM conceded simple and plain that one of the reasons is because 2025 is an election year.
Prioritizing politics, he explained that he didn't want the change to be used as fuel for the Opposition to use against them. But he also explained that the reason for the delay is also so that there could be a proper rollout with more education for those affected.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"It was a number of things, because we had approved the concept when Minister Oscar Requena brought it to Cabinet. But the consultations have been long, tedious, trying to get it going. But it seems that there's still a lot of uncertainty. Some people believe, especially in the villages, all of a sudden you're going to charge me and we're a small business and so we find honestly that we don't want it to be caught up in the whole politics of 2025. As we know, 2025 is going to be an election and so to avoid an instance of the political process, getting involved and the opposition getting involved and saying, oh you are taxing more people, and we have to explain it is not, you know, that whole back and forth. We said let's wait, let's finish the process properly, let's properly educate our citizens as to what this is going to be all about. The businesses, the bars, and in the villages you have some big stores, they should be paying something and should be able to go to the village council, so that's the positive of it. I'm told the downside to it is that probably some of the councils might end up collecting less money but we don't know, I've not seen the numbers, I'm just being told that. So we've agreed that let us hold on, and the time is upon us, January 1st. I don't think we've properly prepared everybody to institute it so we have asked that we delay it and then we introduce or start with it, put it into law, 1st of October next year so we have enough time to be able to go into the new year."
