Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

An in­junc­tion pre­vent­ing the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (Ude­cott) from pro­ceed­ing with the evic­tion of ven­dors op­er­at­ing at the Break­fast Shed (Femmes du Chalet) will re­main in ef­fect at least un­til the end of this month.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that when the mat­ter came be­fore Jus­tice Christo­pher Sieuc­hand yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, at­tor­ney Ken­neth Munroe-Brown — who helped es­tab­lish a non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion rep­re­sent­ing the af­fect­ed ven­dors and se­cured the in­junc­tion on their be­half late last month — re­quest­ed an ad­journ­ment.

The ad­journ­ment was re­port­ed­ly sought to clar­i­fy the le­gal team that will con­tin­ue to han­dle the lit­i­ga­tion on be­half of the or­gan­i­sa­tion go­ing for­ward.

The in­junc­tion was not dis­charged and will re­main in place un­til the mat­ter re­sumes on May 26.

The or­gan­i­sa­tion was, how­ev­er, or­dered to pay $7,000 in le­gal costs for the wast­ed hear­ing.

In Sep­tem­ber last year, Ude­cott is­sued de­mand let­ters to the ven­dors seek­ing al­most $2 mil­lion in rental ar­rears.

That move re­sult­ed in the tem­po­rary clo­sure of the fa­cil­i­ty.

The in­junc­tion forms part of sub­stan­tive le­gal ac­tion be­ing pur­sued by the ven­dors over sev­er­al long-stand­ing dis­putes in­volv­ing the fa­cil­i­ty. It was ob­tained af­ter Ude­cott threat­ened evic­tion pro­ceed­ings late last month.

The ven­dors claim they are still owed com­pen­sa­tion stem­ming from their re­lo­ca­tion to the Break­fast Shed af­ter their orig­i­nal Wright­son Road lo­ca­tion was de­mol­ished to fa­cil­i­tate con­struc­tion of the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front Cen­tre.

They have al­so al­leged that they were over­charged for elec­tric­i­ty af­ter al­leged­ly be­ing in­cor­rect­ly clas­si­fied as in­dus­tri­al cus­tomers in­stead of com­mer­cial cus­tomers.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the ven­dors have com­plained that Ude­cott rou­tine­ly re­claims por­tions of the fa­cil­i­ty dur­ing the Car­ni­val sea­son with­out pro­vid­ing them with com­pen­sa­tion.