Raymond calls for transparency in govt hotel projects

Afra Raymond
Afra Raymond

Despite billions of dollars spent to finance, build and furnish the four biggest hotels in the country, the agreements between the government and operators are kept secret, something public procurement activist Afra Raymond has said needs be changed.

“Public land is being developed with public money, supposedly for public benefit, but when you ask for the details they can’t tell you because ‘It’s a private deal,’” Raymond told the audience at the Cipriani College of Labour and Co-Operative Studies’ 2019 budget review on Tuesday.

Raymond noted that he had long been trying to get the agreements, most recently, the memorandum of agreement between the TT government and Jamaican luxury hotel chain Sandals, signed last year. He pointed out that he had been blocked because the parties apparently don’t want people to know the details, but Thursday, High Court judge Frank Seepersad granted Raymond’s request to call for the government to provide certain documents relating to the MoA as required by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In his budget presentation last Friday Finance Minister Colm Imbert was adamant that the government would be moving ahead with the Sandals Tobago project, calling it one of the country’s six major economic game-changers.

Raymond was sceptical about the whole process, starting with the traditional model.

“It’s unique to this island that the state has paid to build the hotels – Hilton in 1962, the Hyatt Regency in 2008, and the now Magdalena Grand in 1999/2000. The biggest hotel (with 750 rooms) will be Sandals, and that will be built by the State too. So they will continue this model where we spend our taxpayers’ dollars and provide the land to design, build, finance and furnish the property, and then do an operational agreement with the hotel,” he said.

While the Prime Minister has sought to comfort the population by saying the deal is transparent and the population shouldn’t be concerned, Raymond argued that it’s the same plan and should be allowed scrutiny.

“Nobody knows what the arrangement is. You can never get any disclosure about the performance of the contract.

“We are in a republic with a FOIA. The property belongs to us and we simply do not know what the return on the investment is and I am being asked to take comfort,” he said. He also questioned the government’s promise of 2,000 new jobs, noting that the class of clientele at Sandals is different from those who visit the island now, and as such, the operators may not want to take a chance on local work ethics.

“Some of the attitudes we have – let’s be frank – don’t fit into that (service model). So when we hear projections about 2,000 employed, I don’t know how many of them will be locals. Because whether you like them or not, the people who run Sandals have a standard, and they are not going to take a chance that somebody (behaves inappropriately),” Raymond said.

Generally, though, Raymond was clear that the model the country has to oversee its hotel holdings needed to be re-evaluated.

“The agreement to run the hotels is confidential. The question is, how do we gather the institutional knowledge to manage the investment?

“Hilton and Magdalena Grand are managed by Evolving Tecknologies and Enterprise Development Company Ltd (eTecK). Hyatt is managed by the Urban Development Company (Udecott). Now there’s a fourth, a new state enterprise to hold the Sandals resort.

“The least we should do is put them into one state enterprise with one chairman so we could have a development and growth of institutional knowledge. (As it is now) the potential for institutional learning is reduced,” he said.

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