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Published On: Thu, Jan 11th, 2018

Emmanuel attacks newspaper again

PHILIPSBURG – Vromi-Minister Christophe Emmanuel continued his relentless attack on the media – the Daily Herald in particular – during Wednesday’s Council of Ministers press briefing. “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed, but if you read the newspaper you are misinformed,” the minister said – and he was not joking. “I ask people to seek out what is truth, what is baseless and what are simply baseless lies.”

On Tuesday he had already denied that he had ever filed a complaint against fellow minister Emil Lee, even though the Daily Herald had quoted him verbatim from a Fernando Clark radio broadcast where he said that he had field a complaint.

Emmanuel questioned yesterday whether there is a recording of the broadcast. “Where is the recording?” he said, adding that he had “absolutely not” made the statement the newspaper attributed to him on December 19 of last year. It remains unclear why the minister did not set the record straight in December.

But Emmanuel had more complaints against the newspaper, in particular about an editorial that dealt with the marine industry. In it, the paper wrote that barges that had come from other islands “With large enough equipment to remove the biggest wrecks” had been refused to operate “based on technicalities and formalities.”

“This is what you get when there is only one newspaper on the island, “Emmanuel grumbled, adding that the government had explained the situation “up the wazoo.”

He quoted from a letter from authorities in the Bahamas that the barge in question, MV Titan GB 6474, “had no certificates to operate outside Bahamian waters.”

Emmanuel said that in the meantime more than 200 salvage permits have been issued. He noted that the barge from the Bahamas was illegal. “They did not come here to help, thy came here to pillage,” he said.