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…
Author: The Publisher
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’…
Dear Editor, In the Council of Ministers Press Briefing held on Wednesday, June 17, 2020, the Honorable Prime Minister Jacobs recounted the virtual meeting that she and the Minister of Finance had with State Secretary of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations, drs. Raymond Knops. The word that caught my attention during the Prime Minister’s report was the word “respect” because she used it several times during her talk. Apparently, the meeting did not go as the Prime Minister expected, and as she said it was “ended quite abruptly by State Secretary Knops”. I think that before judging who is right…
AIRPORT—The WICSU and the ABVO unions representing the workers at the Princess Juliana International Airport have finally come to a compromise with the management of the airport on the cost-cutting measures for the workers. According to the Chief Executive Officer Brian Mingo, the meeting was cordial. During a general meeting to explain the way forward for the airport, several topics were discussed, including the proposal on the cost-cutting measures with the staff on Wednesday. Mingo pointed out that the government of St. Maarten had issued a 12,5 percent cost-cutting measure for all workers across the board. However, Windward Islands Airways…
