Raphael John-Lall

raphael.lall@guardian.co.tt

San­dals Re­sorts In­ter­na­tion­al will not be re­turn­ing to T&T said Min­is­ter Stu­art Young on Wednes­day night at a fo­rum en­ti­tled Eco­nom­ic Im­pli­ca­tions of the Ter­mi­na­tion of the San­dals Project in To­ba­go, held at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), St Au­gus­tine.

The event was mod­er­at­ed by Guardian Me­dia’s Man­ag­ing Ed­i­tor, Ju­lian Rogers.

“There is no San­dals project. San­dals is not com­ing to To­ba­go. Af­ter two years of dis­cus­sions and at­tempt­ed ne­go­ti­a­tions San­dals has picked up and has left. I do not want to spend any more time on my part dis­cussing what San­dals could have been. It is a waste of time,” he said.

On Jan­u­ary 15, cit­ing “bad­ger­ing” and neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty, San­dals Re­sorts In­ter­na­tion­al CEO Geb­hard Rain­er an­nounced that the com­pa­ny will be leav­ing the coun­try.

Young said there are “lessons to be learned” from the San­dals ex­pe­ri­ence.

“Any suc­cess­ful com­pa­ny has a suc­cess­ful brand, it be­comes an is­sue. If we as a coun­try want to be se­ri­ous and want to at­tract in­vest­ment and suc­cess­ful in­ter­na­tion­al brands we need to change our way of do­ing busi­ness. The ex­pe­ri­ence that T&T needs to learn from this is if you want to at­tract se­ri­ous in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies and pri­vate sec­tor mon­ey to in­vest in T&T we have to re­spect things like con­fi­den­tial­i­ty,” he said.

He added that it was un­for­tu­nate the coun­try got caught up in “old talk” and “neg­a­tiv­i­ty” and this drove San­dals, a “great in­ter­na­tion­al brand’, away from T&T.

Busi­ness­man Arthur Lok Jack who al­so spoke at the fo­rum said that the project had its ori­gins in 2015 at a din­ner at his home in­volv­ing the Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, founder and Chair­man of San­dals Re­sort Butch Stew­art, CEO of Massy Group Ger­vase Warn­er, among oth­er guests.

He al­so said all was not lost and that the project could be re­vived with pri­vate sec­tor in­vest­ment.

“I am still try­ing to get Mr Stew­art to re­turn. I de­cid­ed to raise pri­vate sec­tor cap­i­tal to part­ner with the Gov­ern­ment to see whether that would change his mind by re­mov­ing the risk of Gov­ern­ment-owned and con­trolled. The cap­i­tal would come from var­i­ous en­ti­ties de­pend­ing on the fi­nan­cial terms agreed.”

He said that To­ba­go need­ed San­dals more than San­dals need­ed To­ba­go.

“To­ba­go is noth­ing. It is our coun­try. To­ba­go is a hard sell and here we had an op­por­tu­ni­ty of a life­time and we threw it away,” he said.