Tax fugitives
By Hilbert Haar The National Gazette reads these days as a manual for tax payers on the run. Hundreds of pages in the government’s official publication are dedicated to the listing of companies and private citizens that have outstanding taxes and that are nowhere to be found. In the Gazette publications issued between October 11 and December 20 I More...
Election candidates are running for office in Parliament
Reminder: election candidates are running for office in Parliament, not to become a minister in government. Each political party that obtains proportional representation in Parliament via its candidates and is More...
Just a pipe dream
By Hilbert Haar Wow, the funding agreements for the airport-reconstruction with the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have finally been signed by the current government. That’s good news for the airport More...
The writing is on the wall
By Hilbert Haar Let me make one thing clear before writing anything else. The real winners and losers will become apparent only after the January 9, 2020 elections. But I still think, quoting Greta Thunberg, that More...
Playing dead
By Hilbert Haar The interim government led by Silveria Jacobs currently consists of five ministers – one from the United St. Maarten party (USp) and the rest are all with the National Alliance (NA). Until the More...
The blame game
By Hilbert Haar The parliament meeting about funding for the airport reconstruction was rather bewildering – at least, that was my experience. Finance Minister Perry Geerlings made clear that the bondholders More...
At a snail’s pace
By Hilbert Haar Without further ado, former Finance Minister Michael Ferrier has pointed to the procedures the World Bank uses for the distribution of recovery-dollars from the trust fund to explain why post Hurricane More...
The law on long lease
By Hilbert Haar The Christophe Emmanuel case begs a lot of questions. The first one is of course whether a crime was committed at all. From the currently available information it is hard to answer this question More...
Occam’s razor
By Hilbert Haar On August 29, 2017, I wrote an opinion about Parlatino for the Today newspaper that contains the following paragraphs. “The ties between the island – via the former Netherlands Antilles – and More...
Razor-thin motivation
By Hilbert Haar The motion of CDA parliamentarian Chris van Dam that calls for Dutch involvement in law enforcement on St. Maarten comes across as a fine example of Dutch meddling in our island’s affairs. That More...
