Rowley: Tobago will get $500m Marriott hotel

The Prime Minister declared the $500 million Marriott hotel project earmarked for Rocky Point, Tobago will not suffer the fate of the Sandals resort project. The project is expected to among the main talking points in the campaign leading up to the December 6 Tobago House of Assembly (THA) election.

Addressing the issue at a PNM virtual post-budget meeting in Belmont on Friday night, Dr Rowley said, "I am giving you fair warning. That project you are talking about..come hell or high water... Tobagonians will have." He said, "You go to Tobago. A hotel site has been there for 14 years..approved as a hotel site."

After previous attempts to get local or foreign investment in the project, Rowley said a request for proposals (RFP) was put out, a team was created to review the responses to the RFP. "It came down to two and then they evaluated them and told the Cabinet, this is the best proposal."

Rowley declared, "We now have a $500 million investment by a local consortium in Tobago and they (UNC) have a problem with that and have the gall to come in the Parliament...and talking about the loss of Sandals." Sandals Resorts International withdrew from a proposed resort in Tobago in 2019, after questions were raised by the UNC and other people about the project.

He quipped, "These are the people who drove Sandals' family out of Tobago with their stupidness and their lies...and now behaving as though something was lost."

Rowley said, "You can't lose what you never had. You never gave them a chance to sit down with the Government and discuss terms and conditions."

The UNC, he continued, "fabricated all kinds of lies...fooled people and got them in the papers...two pages every Sunday, to write stupidness." Rowley said when Sandals was building new resorts in other Caribbean islands, "you (UNC) coming in a budget to talk about Sandals."

He slammed attempts by the UNC to claim there was some kind of corruption every time the Government tried to encourage investment in TT. "Every time a local company is encouraged to invest in this country, the Opposition launches a personal attack on the principals in that company...and start talking...and making accusations...and talking as if all of us are the same."

Rowley said this was indicative of what the UNC allowed when it was in government between 2010 and 2015. "They're weighing our corn in their bushel. That is how they used to behave.That is not happening under this government."

Under the PNM, Rowley said business people are encouraged to invest and "we are looking for opportunities for more and more investment."

Referring to Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar's contribution to the budget debate in the House of Representatives on Friday morning, Rowley said Persad-Bissessar showed the UNC was out of touch with reality. "You (Persad-Bissessar) were not prime minister in a pandemic and when the Treasury had nothing."

He reminded Persad-Bissessar, "The population handed us (PNM) the government in September 2015 when you crashed the country because oil prices...gas prices had started to fall in 2014."

Rowley said instead of doing the sensible thing "which is to restrain your spending and your thiefing...you had record-breaking spending...so by the time you handed us the country...she (Persad-Bissessar) had the gall to say, we came in 2015 and by three months later, we were taking money out of the Heritage programme."

Rowley said had the PNM not taken steps manage TT's expenditure better than the UNC "crapaud would have smoked pipe in this country from 2016 onwards."

Saying the UNC refuses to accept the realities caused by the covid19 pandemic and no country has been spared, Rowley said only by making the right choices will TT successfully navigate its way out of the pandemic. "We are going to make it."

Promising that Friday's meeting was the first of many to come, Rowley declared, "From here on in...the battle has been joined." He vowed, "Every time they lie to you..we'll tell you the truth."