Nadaleen Singh

Vice-pres­i­dent of Hu­man Re­sources at SM Jaleel, Roger Berke­ley, said yes­ter­day that the neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty be­ing gen­er­at­ed from the Drug En­force­ment Ad­min­is­tra­tion's probe of the re­cent $644 mil­lion co­caine seizure in the Unit­ed States has im­pact­ed heav­i­ly on the psy­che of the com­pa­ny's own­ers and em­ploy­ees."We have 2,000 em­ploy­ees through­out the re­gion and their lives and liveli­hoods de­pend on the suc­cess of the busi­ness...that's one as­pect of it," he said yes­ter­day, dur­ing the Morn­ing Pan­chay­at Show on 106.5FM."The oth­er as­pect that is be­ing missed is that SM Jaleel is a vic­tim – be­hind the cor­po­rate en­ti­ty and be­hind all of the prod­ucts and so on, there are hu­man be­ings. SM Jaleel is not just the name of the com­pa­ny but it is al­so the name of the founder of the com­pa­ny and his fam­i­ly's rep­u­ta­tion."We are chal­lenged in de­fend­ing the in­tegri­ty of our em­ploy­ees, the in­tegri­ty of our share­hold­ers and the stake­hold­ers of the or­gan­i­sa­tion."

The DEA is cur­rent­ly in the coun­try wrap­ping up loose ends in its in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the drug haul, which was made at the Port of Nor­folk in Vir­ginia on De­cem­ber 20. The il­le­gal drugs, which left the Port of Port-of-Spain on No­vem­ber 17 in a 20-foot con­tain­er, were hid­den in more than 700 tins of Trinidad Juice cans.SM Jaleel has dis­tanced it­self from the ship­ment, not­ing that it does not ship from the Port of Port-of-Spain and that the la­bels used on the tins were al­so fake. How­ev­er, it has not es­caped at­ten­tion and crit­i­cism from the pub­lic as spec­u­la­tion con­tin­ues about who might be the big fish be­hind the ship­ment.Berke­ley al­so said he sup­port­ed Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith's de­ci­sion to pre­vent the re­lease of sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion on the in­ves­ti­ga­tion to the lo­cal me­dia from the lo­cal law en­force­ment of­fi­cers as­sist­ing the DEA. How­ev­er, he said the com­pa­ny wants the probe to be com­plet­ed, the pub­lic to know the truth and the com­pa­ny's name cleared.

"SM Jaleel's po­si­tion is that the in­ves­ti­ga­tion needs to take place quick­ly and the in­for­ma­tion needs to be dis­sem­i­nat­ed to the pub­lic," he said.

"We un­der­stand the need for some lev­el of sen­si­tiv­i­ty in terms of the in­for­ma­tion that is be­ing gath­ered. At the end of the day, the com­pa­ny is be­ing por­trayed in a neg­a­tive light and the name of SM Jaleel needs to cleared as quick­ly as pos­si­ble."Ear­li­er this week, Grif­fith al­so said he was go­ing af­ter the "big fish" in­volved in the on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions.Re­spond­ing to those claims, SM Jaleel ex­port/im­port man­ag­er Robert Lim Choy said: "I think the main thing right now is that a lot of peo­ple are re­al­ly frus­trat­ed with the 'lit­tle fish, big fish' sce­nario."Be­fore we were ful­ly cleared they just want­ed some­one to fall, the big­ger the some­one the bet­ter. We (T&T) had a his­to­ry in the past of not fol­low­ing through ful­ly as a coun­try in terms of pros­e­cut­ing in­di­vid­u­als."He con­firmed that the com­pa­ny had not been ap­proached by the DEA to as­sist in the in­ves­ti­ga­tions.