Afra: It cost TT a true learning experience

MARLENE AUGUSTINE AND CARLA BRIDGLAL

ACTIVIST and past president of the Joint Consultative Council for the Construction Industry, Afra Raymond, has said the abrupt way the Tobago Sandals project was stopped has cost TT a “true learning experience.”

“I do not think that it is a good thing that the project was stopped and in this manner, since we are unlikely to get any true learning from the experience, given our natural tendency to ship along to the next new thing. I heard a project management guru say that the only failed projects are the ones we learn nothing from, so I am going to try to learn from all this,” Raymond told Newsday in an e-mailed statement.

Raymond, who petitioned the State for the release of the Sandals memorandum of understanding (MoU) as a matter of public interest last year — and won — said the questions he and other dissenters seemed to have an impact on the Jamaican luxury hotel chain’s decision to pull out.

In a press conference yesterday, Sandals CEO Gebhard Rainer said negative publicity about the deal prompted its decision, while Communications Minister Stuart Young, who led the discussion on behalf of the government, said it was a “handful of people... some with agendas” who caused a top international brand to leave the country.

Raymond said his focus was the underlying commercial arrangements that apply to state-owned hotels. “TT has a unique model in the Caribbean, in that we pay to design, build, fit and furnish these hotels, with the hotelier operating via a management agreement. In the rest of the Caribbean, he said, it is the private sector that builds and receives tax and/or duty concessions to compensate.

“So far, so good – but what made the Tobago Sandals deal so unique was that they somehow negotiated an MoU in which all the capital was being invested by our taxpayers, and yet they were still going to receive tax and duty concessions with no obligations as to local employment or the local supply of goods and services. You see? It was real Tobago love,” he said.

Last November, after much public outcry about their lack of transparency in the process, the government released the MoU for scrutiny.

“The terms outlined in that MoU were so detrimental that it was beyond a bad joke,” Raymond said.

He said while comments made by Sandals last year suggested the group would pull out of negotiations, “our vigilance is importnat if we are to make real progress in this place.”