06/08/2026
🤔 Trinidad and Tobago has a pattern: questions about political money only get asked after something has already gone wrong. By the time the public starts asking who funded what and why we didn’t know sooner, the damage - to trust, to a family, to public confidence - is already done.
🤫 Here’s why: T&T still has no law requiring political parties to disclose who funds them. The Representation of the People Act caps an individual candidate’s spending at $50,000, but places no limit, and no disclosure duty, on party financing itself. Neither the Constitution nor the Act even defines a “political party.” So the public only learns how political money moves when a crisis forces it into view.
We’ve seen this a couple of times in recent months:
Balisier House is currently the subject of a Preliminary Unexplained Wealth Order, a legal tool that compels an explanation for assets disproportionate to known income. While it can be helpful from an accountability perspective, it’s a reactive tool since it only comes into play once an investigation is already underway. There’s still no proactive equivalent requiring parties to disclose their financing before a court order ever becomes necessary.
Separately, a businessman’s killing earlier this year turned public attention to reports that he had made political contributions in the range of millions of dollars. Under current law, none of that would be able to be confirmed, denied, or placed on record since donations of that scale can remain entirely invisible unless tragedy forces the question into the open.
⚠️ Two different situations, but one common gap: financing this significant shouldn’t only become visible through a court order or a crisis.
📃The fix has existed since 2015: the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, party registration, audited statements, donor disclosure above a threshold, and independent EBC oversight.
Transparency shouldn’t have to wait for an incident to demand it.
