Sean Nero

Tourism Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe has de­nied that Gov­ern­ment forced CEO of the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (TDC) Kei­th Chin to re­sign. Chin ten­dered his res­ig­na­tion from the State agency on Ju­ly 1 af­ter two years on the job. The ac­tion sur­prised many at the TDC and across the tourism sec­tor who said he was the most sta­ble se­nior man­age­ment of­fi­cial at the State agency and had helped to sta­bilise the or­gan­i­sa­tion which was un­der­fund­ed and un­der staffed.

War­ren Solomon, gen­er­al man­ag­er for mar­ket­ing at the TDC, has been ap­point­ed to act in the po­si­tion.

There had been claims that the res­ig­na­tion was linked to state­ments made by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, at a po­lit­i­cal meet­ing in St Joseph when he said two State agen­cies–the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (TDC) and the Na­tion­al Lot­ter­ies Con­trol Board (NL­CB)–spent $734,000 of tax­pay­ers' mon­ey on a ra­dio sta­tion to de­fame him.

Row­ley said he heard com­ments be­ing made about him on State-owned Talk City 91.1 FM's Ground Re­port pro­gramme, which he de­scribed as "most vul­gar, out­ra­geous and filthy."

Talk City is owned and op­er­at­ed by State-owned Caribbean New Me­dia Group. In May, June and Ju­ly of 2013, Row­ley said the ra­dio sta­tion re­ceived pay­ments of $86,000, $100,000 and $86,000 re­spec­tive­ly. For the pe­ri­ods Sep­tem­ber, Oc­to­ber and De­cem­ber 2014, the sta­tion col­lect­ed $45,000, $40,000 and $30,000. By April of 2015, Row­ley said a to­tal of "$734,000 was paid" to the Ground Re­port.

But Cud­joe re­fut­ed sug­ges­tions that the two in­ci­dents were linked.

"No! Not to my knowl­edge at all!" she told the T&T Guardian.

"The CEO would have sub­mit­ted his res­ig­na­tion and I be­lieve he is mov­ing on­to green­er pas­tures. In his let­ter, he did not say I am re­sign­ing for x, y, and z, but he has de­cid­ed to re­sign, so that's the in­for­ma­tion I have re­ceived. I don't think it has any­thing to do with a fall-out," the min­is­ter said.

Cud­joe in­sist­ed that things were run­ning smooth­ly at the TDC.

"Of course, there are the chal­lenges be­cause we are op­er­at­ing in a time of less re­source, so you have to look at your way of op­er­a­tion be­cause if the rest of the coun­try is op­er­at­ing on a bud­get then ob­vi­ous­ly we have to be on a bud­get, too. So, some of the things that we could have in­dulged in or ex­plored be­fore, we can't right now.

"For in­stance over­seas trav­el and some of the spend­ing, we have to look at that. The strat­e­gy that we used be­fore ob­vi­ous­ly has to be dif­fer­ent now. I think that the work­ers at the TDC are do­ing their best with the re­sources that they have on hand."