~ Exclusive interview with two American couples about their bittersweet departure ~ PHILIPSBURG — US citizens who had been vacationing in St. Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius, were able to fly home on a humanitarian flight from St. Maarten to Atlanta on Thursday, May 14, 2020, – the first arranged amid the coronavirus-induced island-wide lockdown. The tiny Caribbean island of St. Maarten has been under a tight lockdown for two months now. 76 coronavirus cases have been confirmed on the Dutch side of the dual nation island, with 15 deaths. Another 3 people died on the French part of the…
Author: The Publisher
PHILIPSBURG – “A high-level overview of the Trust Fund, applicable procedures, ongoing projects and challenges.” This is how the National Reconstruction Program Bureau (NRPB) describes the Focus Audit on the Reconstruction Funds for St. Maarten the General Audit Chamber published this month. The report is a new type of audit: it only presents facts and does not contain recommendations or conclusions. Looking at the numbers, the audit has one inevitable flaw: the exchange rate used convert available Euros into US dollars. The Audit Chamber used an exchange rate of $1.167, whereas the current exchange rate for the euro (per May…
THE HAGUE – Members of the Dutch parliament support the conditions State secretary Drs. Raymond Knops has imposed on Aruba, Curacao and St. Maarten for the provision of liquidity support, but some parliamentarians doubt that the countries will be able to repay the interest-free loans. The Minister Plenipotentiary of Curacao, Anthony Begina attended the debate on Wednesday morning; St. Maarten’s Minister Plenipotentiary René Violenus was absent. By the end of the debate, it was still unclear whether St. Maarten and Curacao had accepted the conditions for liquidity support. State Secretary Knops acknowledged that he had received lengthy letters from both…
By Hilbert Haar Motions are the political banana peel of the political arena. In St. Maarten they seldom result in the desired action expressed in a motion and only in extreme cases (like with a motion of no confidence) do they result in the fall of a government. A motion is not more than a request to government to do something – or not to do something, but the government is under no obligation to execute it. In that sense, most motions are quite useless – a waste of time and energy. Motions only get real teeth if a parliament…
~ MP Heyliger-Marten: “Time to correct 65 years of wrongs and revisit 10-10-10” ~ Wants review of Kingdom Charter – Motion carried by Parliament 12 for and 3 against. PHILIPSBURG — Member of Parliament and Faction Leader for the United People’s Party the honorable Grisha Heyliger-Marten slammed the Kingdom Charter for the Netherlands as being flawed. She says, in its present form it “has not been working for the people of St. Maarten.” The MP brought forward a motion to Parliament urging it to support the Council of Ministers in its quest to secure financial and other assistance to sustainably…
PHILIPSBURG – The Court in First Instance has ordered HBN Holding to compensate its client Alexandre Bourbon for damages caused through the negligent actions of one of its attorneys. The amount of compensation will be determined in a separate procedure. Bourbon hired HBN in March 2013 when he intended to invest in Fralexia, a company that had bought a parcel of land in Beacon Hill from Kildare, the former owner of the Caravanserai Resort (now Alegria). Fralexia bought the parcel for $1,050,000 but it later turned out that the transaction was null and void because Kildare did not have permission…
By Hilbert Haar PHILIPSBURG – The kingdom’s demand that the government lowers the salaries of civil servants by 12.5 percent (as a condition for providing liquidity support) promises to result in a heated debate. The unions have objected and submitted a rather unrealistic counter-proposal. The kingdom expects to get an answer to its demands by Wednesday. But the literature on the subject of one-sided changes in labor conditions suggests that lowering these salaries without approval from all civil servants (or their unions) is a mission impossible. Nuna Zekić, an associate professor at the department of labor law and social policy…
PHILIPSBURG – “Once more we see now what was already clear for a longer period of time: the countries cannot support their own autonomy.” That explosive remark comes from a letter State Secretary Drs. Raymond Knops (Kingdom Relations) sent on Tuesday to the chairman of the Dutch parliament, Khadija Arib, on the eve of the parliamentary debate about liquidity support for Aruba, Curacao and St. Maarten. Knops notes that the gap between rich and poor citizens on the islands is large and that this gap is increasing due to the corona-virus crisis. The state secretary repeats in his letter that…
~ Unions need to present a more detailed explanation to substantiate their 100-million guilders cost savings claim ~ By Hilbert Haar How realistic are the cost-cutting proposals the unions submitted to the government? In a statement that was short on specifics, the unions claimed that their proposals would result in savings of more than 100 million guilders. This amount represents 16.4 percent of the 2020 budget (projected expenditures for the year are 610,557,076 guilders). Where did the unions find those enormous savings? Their press release mentions cutting travel costs and consultancy fees, freezing training, and reducing gas vouchers and the…
PHILIPSBURG – Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs has extended the state of emergency by six weeks by ministerial decree. The six week period ends on June 21. Citizens are allowed to go shopping only on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. the curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. remains in place. With the announcement of the extended state of emergency, the ministry of general affairs has published guidelines for its prevention and safety plan that warns businesses “to prepare for the new normal.” Businesses are allowed to reopen in stages, depending on their risk to public health. In the…
