Former G2K boss says Portia playing tricks

Immediate Past President of Generation 2000 (G2K) Delano Seiveright says yesterday's announcement by Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller to roll back GCT on electricity for all residential customers offers no benefit to the vast majority of Jamaicans.

It is a "three card trick", Seiveright said in a statement.

He said the overwhelming majority of Jamaica Public Service customers do not pay GCT on their electricity bills as they use less than the original taxable threshold of 200 kilo Watt hours per month.

The Government had increased the taxable threshold to 300 kWh.

But yesterday, Simpson Miller announced a roll back.

Seiveright says of the 500,000 JPS residential customers, 377,000 use less than 200kWh of electricity per month representing around 75% residential users.

"Those who use 300 kWh of electricity per month amount to 52,000 residential or roughly 10 per cent," said Seiveright.

He added that the 10 per cent largely represent upper-middle income and rich households. 

In the end, Seiveright said the vast majority of residential users never paid GCT in the first place and so there will benefit in no way from Simpson-Miller’s announcement.

Meanwhile, Seiveright said Simpson-Miller’s budget presentation only reinforced a now commonly held view that the current administration is "completely at sea" on where to take the country and how to get the Jamaican economy in a mode of sustained growth and development.