~ Staff submitted a petition letter with grievances against CFO; wearing black tops to silently voice their protest at work ~ CAY HILL — On Thursday, June 18, 2020, the staff in the Finance Department of the St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC) started to wear black tops. This as a result of the ongoing intimidation, disrespect, and bullying of staff members by the CFO and his attempt to muffle the staff, forcing them to stay quiet about their treatment. The staff gave the management team until Friday, June 19, to respond by midday to their demands. These demands were submitted…
Author: The Publisher
PHILIPSBURG — The reopening of the St. Maarten border on July 1 will not allow Venezuelans on the island to respond to Justice Minister Anna Richardson’s call for illegal immigrants to voluntarily return to their home countries. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has extended the nationwide lockdown to July 12. Remigration and repatriation by air or sea are not possible. According to the Vice President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, the threat to Venezuela today is the ‘return’ of its migrants. Rodriguez made the statement after the government secretary of the border state of Zulia, Lisandro Cabello, said that those who return…
Minister of TEATT Ludmilla De Weever announced via a press statement on Friday evening that the airport will reopen on July 1st, Emancipation Day. The question is, are we ready? According to the airport workers, the airport needs a thorough cleaning before they return to work. One of the safety measures enforced at the airport from July 1st is that only employees and passengers are allowed in the building. Aruba announced a full schedule of flights arriving in July. Already we hear they have canceled some of these flights. Experiences in other destinations demonstrate that many of the destinations are…
THE HAGUE – CDA-parliamentarian Chris van Dam wants the Netherlands to take control of the Pointe Blanche prison for the next five years. In a motion, he will present on Monday in a meeting of the Parliamentary Kingdom Relations Committee Van Dam asks the Kingdom Council of Ministers to manage the prison system while the costs of this exercise will be for the account of St. Maarten. The Law Enforcement Council and the Progress Committee have repeatedly reported that the Pointe Blanche prison is completely inadequate for human detention and as a place to work, Van Dam writes in his…
WILLEMSTAD/PHILIPSBURG — Although it is very unusual for individual salary information to be discussed in public, the Supervisory Board of the Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten (CBCS) has decided to be as transparent as possible without violating the privacy rights of those involved, given the reports regarding the remuneration of the top management and the related turmoil this has caused in Curacao. The Supervisory Board hopes that the following explanation will put the recent reports in the right perspective. The Supervisory Board of The Bank, which was appointed in 2017, in recruiting new directors for the CBCS, commissioned…
Willemstad/Philipsburg – De Raad van Commissarissen (RvC) van de Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten (CBCS) heeft bij haar benoeming in 2017, in de aanloop naar het aantrekken van nieuwe directeuren voor de CBCS, een benchmark onderzoek van de arbeidsvoorwaarden uit laten voeren door een ter zake deskundig onafhankelijk bureau. Doel van het onderzoek was om zowel de primaire als secundaire arbeidsvoorwaarden te beoordelen om vast te kunnen stellen in hoeverre de bestaande beloningsstructuur bij de CBCS aansloot bij de beloningsstructuur van vergelijkbare functies bij andere financiële toezichthouders en de financiële sector, zowel lokaal als in de regio. De…
PHILIPSBURG – On April 2, the Consumers Coalition’s spokesman Drs. Raymond Jessurun exposed the problems diabetic senior citizens were encountering with faulty glucose testers Social and Health Insurances SZV forces them to use. So far, the outcry and numerous calls from seniors like Clifton Wilson have done nothing to correct the situation. SZV denies that there is something wrong with its testers. Jessurun said in April that the faulty testers (Perfect 3) are supplied to SZV together with the strips necessary for testing by Medicosmetics, a company based in Cole Bay with Jan H.R. Beaujon of Curacao as the managing…
Dear Editor, I was pleasantly surprised and extremely pleased to hear the Honorable Prime Minister declare during the Council of Ministers Press Briefing on June 17, 2020, that her Government is living up to the agreements made by the Marlin-Romeo Government. The PM’s exact words were: “Government has done everything, and I mean everything, to live up to conditions set on us by previous agreements set by previous governments, we have maintained those agreements.” For the past eight months I have been waiting for the Jacobs Government to chart a new direction for Sint Maarten because the past opposition in…
PHILIPSBURG — On Friday, June 19, 2020, Member of Parliament Claudius Buncamper sent a letter to the Minister of TEATT, (Tourism, Economic Affairs, Telecommunications and Transportation) Ludmila de Weever, and the minister of VSA (Public Health, Labor and Social Affairs) Richard Panneflek, requesting clarification on information obtained regarding salaries of the workers at the Towers of Mullet Bay. MP Buncamper mentioned in his letters to the ministers that the information obtained concerns, among other matters, the salaries of the workers of the Towers at Mullet Bay which had been cut by 50% since March 2020 and claims by a particular…
PHILIPSBURG – The Court in First Instance has declared inadmissible the demand by a group of Pointe Blanche inmates that the country transfers them to safer prisons, either in the Netherlands or Bonaire. The plaintiffs now have to split the cost of the procedure (1,500 guilders) between them. Initially, 37 inmates joined the court procedure in February, but seven of them withdrew after their release. The inmates complained about the conditions in the prison in a letter to Justice Minister Jurendy Doran on February 17. “Tensions between inmates and staff are running high due to the overpopulated prison. The inmates’…
