PHILIPSBURG – There is a political storm brewing over a letter Minister Plenipotentiary René Violenus sent to State Secretary Drs. Raymond Knops on May 20, informing him that St. Maarten has accepted the requirements for liquidity support unconditionally. These conditions include a 12.5 percent cut in the labor conditions for employees in the (semi) public sector. Did Violenus act solo when he sent this letter? Did he send the letter at the instructions of Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs? Violenus apparently claims that he acted solo, but others maintain that the instruction came from the Prime Minister and that she did…
Author: The Publisher
PHILIPSBURG – Now that the government has accepted the Kingdom’s conditions for liquidity support, the salaries of civil servants and politicians are up for review: a 25 percent cut in the remuneration of politicians and a 12.5 percent cut for civil servants. Earlier we reported that lowering salaries is not all that simple. But on closer inspection it appears that the government has total control over this issue where it concerns the salaries for its civil servants. While Members of Parliament have to approve a national ordinance to regulate their lowered salaries, civil servants are basically at the mercy of…
PHILIPSBURG — Minister of Education drs. Rodolphe Samuel issued a public statement on Thursday, Ascension Day, encouraging parents to be ready for school on Monday, May 25th, 2020. The minister especially had some words of advice for the children who will be going back to school to sit for their exams. The minister is encouraging the parents to make sure their children have all the necessary protective gear at hand so that the children will be able to abide by all safety and health protocols in the schools. In his statement, Minister Samuel asks for the cooperation of the parents…
~ 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…
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…
