Chester Sam­bra­no

The bor­ders will be tem­porar­i­ly opened once again to al­low over 60 Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als cur­rent­ly strand­ed in Suri­name to re­turn home.

At least one mem­ber of the group, Ash­meed Syne, had ap­plied through his at­tor­ney, Umesh Ma­haraj, for an ex­emp­tion to al­low them to re­turn home.

Speak­ing at the COVID-19 news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said he had grant­ed the per­mis­sion to those na­tion­als to re­turn home. How­ev­er, he said he had been ap­proached by an­oth­er com­pa­ny which had na­tion­als work­ing for them spread across Suri­name. He said the ex­act num­ber of peo­ple re­turn­ing is there­fore not yet known and will be worked out over the next 24 to 48 hours.

“I was cor­re­spond­ing with at­tor­neys for 33 na­tion­als but as I said there has been an­oth­er reach out by a cer­tain en­er­gy com­pa­ny that, if I re­mem­ber cor­rect­ly, they are al­so in the thir­ty-some­thing range and I as­sume that there may be oth­ers.”

On Sat­ur­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced the bor­ders would re­main closed un­til May 15, 2020.

Yes­ter­day, Young said up­on their re­turn they will be sub­ject­ed to the as­sess­ment of lo­cal med­ical pro­fes­sion­als and quar­an­tined for the manda­to­ry 14 days.

Young al­so ad­dressed the is­sue of pri­vate jets that en­tered this coun­try over this past week­end. He said the five char­tered jets ar­rived to pick up and take home 62 non-na­tion­als who are em­ployed in the en­er­gy in­dus­try and work off­shore. He said no-one was al­lowed to dis­em­bark from the air­craft.

He ex­plained that it was part of a very, very care­ful­ly planned op­er­a­tion.

“They were brought in via a ma­rine ves­sel, tak­en straight on sani­tised bus­es up to Pi­ar­co,” he said.

Young al­so rub­bished re­ports cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia re­gard­ing cer­tain peo­ple be­ing al­lowed to re­turn to T&T via the pri­vate jets. He said those claims were mis­chief.

He said dis­cus­sions con­tin­ue with the en­er­gy com­pa­nies who op­er­ate in this coun­try to plan a way for­ward on trans­port­ing work­ers in and out of T&T for the next few months.

On an­oth­er bor­der-re­lat­ed is­sue, Young said ear­ly yes­ter­day morn­ing two or three na­tion­als were picked up by lo­cal au­thor­i­ties re­turn­ing from Venezuela. He said they were caught with “a huge amount of fish and shrimp”, adding this was in com­plete con­tra­ven­tion of the COVID-19 reg­u­la­tions and the Cus­toms Act.

Last week, three Ica­cos fish­er­men were al­so caught re­turn­ing from an area near the Venezue­lan bor­der.