Head of Blue Wa­ters, Do­minic Hadeed yes­ter­day said that the Op­po­si­tion was sim­ply be­ing “mis­chie­vous” by sin­gling out him and his com­pa­ny af­ter it was re­vealed that he was able to se­cure ex­emp­tions for 39 non-na­tion­als to en­ter the coun­try.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Hadeed said he was not wor­ried about the un­want­ed at­ten­tion, but he was dis­ap­point­ed.

“I won’t say wor­ried, but I am more dis­ap­point­ed. We know busi­ness has to con­tin­ue, I know the Min­is­ters had said ear­ly o’clock that ex­cep­tions would be made for oil and gas and for man­u­fac­tur­ing. That’s the lifeblood of the coun­try and I think the Op­po­si­tion knows this,” he said.

“They are just be­ing a lit­tle bit mis­chie­vous on their part but it just hap­pened to be my com­pa­ny name that got called this time, it could be any­body,” he said.

The men, ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion in the pub­lic do­main and in­de­pen­dent­ly con­firmed by Guardian Me­dia would be stay­ing at Kapok Ho­tel and Re­gent Star for the first sev­en days and some would them be put up at Hilton and Hy­att.

Sev­er­al peo­ple who have paid to stay at Kapok told Guardian Me­dia that it runs to more than $8,000 per per­son for a week of quar­an­tine.

Hadeed said that it was not a cheap ex­er­cise.

“Bring­ing in these peo­ple like this is very ex­pen­sive. You have to char­ter planes, you have to pay them to be in quar­an­tine for two weeks, so I don’t think any­body to­day do­ing it un­less they ab­solute­ly have to do it be­cause it is very ex­pen­sive,” he said.

The group, Hadeed said was here to work on his pro­duc­tion and as­sem­bly line and this was on train some 10 months ago.

“This is ac­tu­al­ly a big fill­ing line, it is one of our main fill­ing lines that’s over 10 years old and had to be changed. The new line was or­dered just pri­or to Covid (19),” he said.

“Once Covid had come and there was a shut­down we had reached out to the Min­istry (of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty) and said look, the train is al­ready run­ning, this equip­ment is or­dered, we can­not back out now,” he said.

Hadeed said the min­istry told him that while he had giv­en them enough no­tice it was too ear­ly to do any­thing about ex­emp­tions and once every­thing was in or­der he should re-ap­ply.

“They told us what we had to do and we ba­si­cal­ly fol­lowed it. This is some­thing that was known about a year ago and was be­ing planned and pre­pared for, so it’s a lit­tle of a sur­prise to me now that it would cause such a fuss,” he said.

Hadeed said he could not put in an ap­pli­ca­tion ten months in ad­vance for the work­men.

“You have to have ho­tels and flights, so this was a full co­or­di­na­tion. There is a dif­fer­ence be­tween when we put in the ap­pli­ca­tion and when they were first in­formed,” he said.

Hadeed in­sists that there was no jump­ing the ex­emp­tion line or that he re­ceived any priv­i­leges be­cause of his busi­ness stand­ing.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar - “Evil Stu­art Young”

Mean­while Op­po­si­tion leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar yes­ter­day is­sued a me­dia re­lease say­ing that Min­is­ter Young was “dis­crim­i­nat­ing” in who he gave ex­emp­tions.

She al­so thanked Gov­ern­ment MP Fos­ter Cum­mings for “stand­ing up to evil Stu­art Young” re­gard­ing the ex­emp­tion pol­i­cy, as it was re­vealed Cum­mings ex­pressed con­cern that na­tion­als were be­ing ren­dered state­less.

She said the rev­e­la­tion that the 39 non-na­tion­als were grant­ed ex­emp­tions was “star­tling” es­pe­cial­ly as back in March Young said that non-na­tion­al ex­emp­tions would hap­pen on­ly in ex­treme cir­cum­stances.

She said that the whole sit­u­a­tion reeks of dis­crim­i­na­tion.

“Per­haps Min­is­ter Young be­lieves a bot­tling wa­ter ma­chine is more ex­treme than the thou­sands of na­tion­als who re­main locked out abroad go­ing on 313 days now,” she said.

“Does Stu­art Young not re­al­ize that many of the thou­sands of our na­tion­als strand­ed abroad are ei­ther busi­ness own­ers or em­ploy­ees of lo­cal busi­ness­es?” she asked.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said busi­ness­es “close” to the PNM were be­ing giv­en pref­er­en­tial treat­ment while oth­ers were al­lowed to die.

“If this Gov­ern­ment were se­ri­ous about keep­ing our sink­ing econ­o­my afloat, they would re­al­ize that Stu­art Young’s failed ex­emp­tion process needs to be re­formed ur­gent­ly and that Young him­self needs to be fired for his in­com­pe­tence,” she said.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said that if Young could “ex­pe­dite en­try ex­emp­tions for the rich and the pow­er­ful, I de­mand he does the same for the thou­sands of our fel­low or­di­nary cit­i­zens cur­rent­ly strand­ed abroad and in des­per­ate need of help.”