Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

The Chair­man of the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber, Mar­tin George has re­vealed that wastage in To­ba­go has been oc­cur­ring for years.

Speak­ing in an in­ter­view on CNC3’s the Morn­ing Brew, George said: “They have a long his­to­ry, a rich his­to­ry of do­ing these kinds of things.”

George was speak­ing in light of an ar­ti­cle pub­lished in the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian, which high­light­ed the years of wastage by the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), par­tic­u­lar­ly the Di­vi­sion of Tourism dur­ing 2012 to 2016.

Dur­ing that time present po­lit­i­cal leader of the To­ba­go Coun­cil of the PNM was the Sec­re­tary of Tourism and Trans­porta­tion.

It al­so comes on the heels of con­fu­sion sur­round­ing the $50 mil­lion grant to hote­liers, as many are call­ing on the THA of­fi­cials to say how they in­tend to utilise the funds.

Ac­cord­ing to George, the THA did not on­ly waste $32 mil­lion in 2015 to pur­chase two prop­er­ties, Sanc­tu­ary Vil­la at Black Rock and Man­ta Lodge, a Dive Vil­la at Spey­side. He said that this was al­so done with the Rich­mond Great House, where in­vest­ments were made that nev­er ma­te­ri­alised. George said: “Let’s not for­get that. They in­vest­ed in that—that was al­so sup­posed to be turned in­to a tourism fa­cil­i­ty—that al­so failed.”

Ac­cord­ing to George, there has al­ways been the is­sue as to whether gov­ern­ing bod­ies, such as the THA, which would be the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Cen­tral gov­ern­ment—“whether they them­selves should get so di­rect­ly in­volved in an in­dus­try of which they know noth­ing.”

George, who is al­so a prac­tis­ing at­tor­ney, not­ed that there was no prece­dence for the THA to be­lieve that it was ca­pa­ble of run­ning ho­tels ef­fec­tive­ly when the pre­vi­ous own­ers, who have had ex­pe­ri­ence and his­to­ry, failed to do so.

He sug­gest­ed that fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance in the form of a loan guar­an­tee would have been more fea­si­ble, where the own­er would con­tin­ue to run the prop­er­ty but has the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pay back the loan.

How­ev­er, Di­ane Hadad, who was al­so in­ter­viewed on the top­ic, said that the prop­er­ties had al­ready owed the banks a lot of mon­ey. As a re­sult the banks were hes­i­tant to do more busi­ness with the then own­ers.

Ac­cord­ing to Hadad, who is Chair­man of the To­ba­go Chap­ter of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (T&T Cham­ber), the THA’s se­ri­ous­ness about tourism was dis­played to the pri­vate sec­tor when it took over the two prop­er­ties.

Hadad in­di­cat­ed that she was the head of the To­ba­go Cham­ber at that time in 2015, where gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor were all on board to change the whole is­land’s land­scape around its econ­o­my by en­hanc­ing the tourism prod­uct.

She said af­ter mul­ti­ple hun­dreds of meet­ings, and even pro­duc­ing a doc­u­ment called “Let’s in­vig­o­rate To­ba­go”, noth­ing ma­te­ri­alised and the pri­vate sec­tor got de­spon­dent.

“This is why the pri­vate sec­tor is so hes­i­tant and very re­luc­tant to go to meet­ings and say that they are work­ing for these peo­ple any­more be­cause of all of these ex­pe­ri­ences,” said Hadad. She added that the cur­rent rev­e­la­tions are not all, and that “there are a lot of oth­er sto­ries that we can give you to add to the list”.