PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

While many things were thrown off by the ac­tions of Caribbean Air­lines pi­lots over the week­end, car­go de­liv­er­ies for the most part were not.

Ac­cord­ing to CEO of e-com­merce ser­vice Web Source, Lin­coln Ma­haraj, car­go flights were not af­fect­ed as those planes are wet leased and flown by in­ter­na­tion­al pi­lots.

He con­firmed that his com­pa­ny’s op­er­a­tions were not af­fect­ed by the sit­u­a­tion over the week­end as a re­sult.

AM­CHAM CEO Ni­rad Tewarie al­so con­firmed that there was lit­tle com­plaint from the Cham­ber’s mem­ber­ship con­cern­ing car­go, but did note that there were un­der­ly­ing is­sues af­fect­ing car­go de­liv­ery which need to be ad­dressed.

“The is­sue with re­gard to car­go though is acute and ar­guably get­ting worse rather than bet­ter. We had a meet­ing with the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, a lit­tle more than a month ago and it was agreed that we would es­tab­lish a com­mit­tee to fo­cus specif­i­cal­ly on the air­port in­clu­sive of Cus­toms. So we are look­ing at the es­tab­lish­ment of that com­mit­tee and work­ing on the very re­al and press­ing is­sues at the air­port,” said Tewarie in a phone con­ver­sa­tion with the Guardian yes­ter­day.

Last week, the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion an­nounced that all de­posits of car­go at the Swis­s­port tran­sit shed were be­ing tem­porar­i­ly stopped to fa­cil­i­tate the com­ple­tion of an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of a breach of the Cus­toms Act.

Tewarie not­ed that this sit­u­a­tion has fur­ther cre­at­ed is­sues for busi­ness­es.

“There are changes be­ing made to op­er­a­tions at the tran­sit sheds, right now there is an is­sue at the Swisss­port bond that is where Cus­toms has stopped some op­er­a­tions and that is caus­ing some chal­lenges,” said Tewarie, “We do need to ad­dress these is­sues at the root and make sure that we do all of the very sim­ple but nec­es­sary things that need to be done to al­low busi­ness to func­tion as it should be­cause right now the im­pact on busi­ness­es small and large is very, very, very se­vere. It is push­ing up costs through no fault of busi­ness­es.”

He said that these car­go is­sues have af­fect­ed both busi­ness­es and the con­sumers.

Tewarie ex­plained, “It is af­fect­ing mar­gins. In fact, it is com­press­ing mar­gins fur­ther mean­ing be­cause of the ad­di­tion­al costs the dif­fer­ence be­tween what peo­ple ac­tu­al­ly pay for the goods when it is in the stores or to de­liv­er ver­sus what they sell it for is less.”

Pres­i­dent of the Greater San Fer­nan­do Cham­ber Ki­ran Singh said the sick­out ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed busi­ness con­nec­tiv­i­ty and has led to busi­ness­men in­cur­ring greater costs as a re­sult.

“It af­fect­ed busi­ness con­nec­tiv­i­ty, now that the pan­dem­ic is over all of our meet­ings are ba­si­cal­ly face to face. We have gone back to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els were we could have face to face con­tact,’ said Singh, “We could not do this be­cause of the fact the air­line trans­port had stopped.”

Singh ex­plained that his mem­bers would have suf­fered more than busi­ness­es in Cen­tral and North Trinidad as a re­sult of the in­creased dis­tances re­quired to trav­el.