Cft urges St. Maarten to implement revenue-increasing and cost-cutting measures

PHILIPSBURG — St. Maarten has to speed up the implementation of revenue-increasing and cost-cutting measures if it wants to return to structural budget-surpluses in the near future. “Without additional measures, the International Monetary Fund expects that the balance on the regular budget will remain negative until 2026,” financial supervisor More...

Financial supervisor Cft critical of 2020 budget
PHILIPSBURG — Financial supervisor Cft has expressed serious criticism about St. Maarten’s approved 2020 budget in a letter to Finance Minister Ardwell Irion dated May 20. The letter became public this More...

Motion asks for modest paycuts but Parliament approves budget without it
PHILIPSBURG – Reluctantly, Parliament accepted a motion tabled by National Alliance MP Ludmilla Duncan to cut salaries of parliamentarians and ministers, while it rejected a further-reaching motion with the same More...

MP Brison: “Central Bank has not done near enough”
PHILIPSBURG – “The Central bank of Curacao and Sint Maarten has not done near enough to assist the people of St. Maarten,” chairman of parliament MP Rolando Brison said during the meeting of parliament about More...

Budget 2020: personnel costs keep going up
PHILIPSBURG – The draft 2020 budget understandably shows significantly higher expenditures due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it seems that the government is unable to get a grip on its ballooning personnel costs More...

Salaries for ministers unchanged in 2020 draft budget
PHILIPSBURG – The draft 2020 budget does not contain any indication that ministers and parliamentarians will take a ten percent salary cut. On the contrary, the listed salaries for all ministers – with the More...

Draft 2020 budget meets with criticism
PHILIPSBURG – The draft 2020 budget closes with a deficit of 263.2 million guilders ($147 million). Expenditures total 610.5 million and revenue 347.3 million. The Council of Advice is critical of the budget: More...

MP Mercelina tackles national health insurance plan again
PHILIPSBURG – MP Luc Mercelina (United Democrats) repeated his objections against the introduction of a National Health Insurance (NHI) plan during the handling of the draft 2019 budget in parliament on Monday. More...

Websites for dummies (UPDATED)
By Hilbert Haar Technology is wonderful. I can be anywhere in the world, watch what is happening anywhere else and write about it. Organizations – like the parliament and the government of St. Maarten – use More...

Minister Geerlings criticizes Dutch interference
PHILIPSBURG - Finance Minister Perry Geerlings criticized the Kingdom for interfering in St. Maarten’s affairs by attaching conditions to the provision of badly needed liquidity support but at the same time he More...