Drag Mall vendors ready to go to court

Attorney Gerald Ramdeen is wasting no time in helping the vendors of the Drag Brothers Mall who have been blocked from entering the building after a fire broke out two Saturdays ago, damaging two of the booths.

The mall is on Independence Square along the Brian Lara Promenade.

The vendors protested last week Monday after authorities said they could not go back into the building and would instead be relocated to East Side Plaza on Charlotte Street. They felt they were being taken away from the heart of the business area to an area which they claimed was a “dead end” and rife with crime.

Ramdeen said his clients were determined to fight against this move and he was sending correspondence to the Housing Ministry about their claim that the building was given to them by past prime minister Patrick Manning.

“The plan was that the property would be developed for the Drag Brothers. They were given another property in Diego Martin that was supposed to be their workshop. They were supposed to be regularised, just as the Charlotte Street vendors, but nothing ever came of the chance to regularise them, and therefore they remained without paying a rent, having completed the property with their own funding, with the understanding that they would remain there and ply their trade.

He said the fire had started in “two of the booths Government has now sprung onto the property and is trying to remove them and put them in East Side Plaza.

“They have not said why they want to remove all of them. They are trying to use the fire to say they can’t go back in the place and they have to be removed, which is totally against what they were promised,” Ramdeen told Newsday.

He said their intention was to fight it because nobody wanted to go in East Side Plaza from the heart of the busy business area along the Brian Lara Promenade.

“The genesis of this (is), these people were plying their trade before the Brian Lara Promenade was constructed. Because the promenade was going to be constructed, Manning told them they needed to move, because they needed the space, and therefore we would put you in this place and you could ply your trade.