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Sunday, July 13, 2025

Raymond: Negative publicity not real reason for Sandals pullout

by

Rhondor Dowlat
2370 days ago
20190115
Afra Raymond

Afra Raymond

TONY HOWELL

For­mer head of the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil (JCC) Afra Ray­mond said he strong­ly be­lieves that neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty is not the re­al rea­son why San­dals Re­sorts pulled out of the To­ba­go San­dals project.

He spec­u­lates that it could have been “What are the ‘Un­der­ly­ing Com­mer­cial Arrange­ments’?

“I don’t be­lieve that the San­dals Brand suf­fered any neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty, least of all from my work. There is no doubt that San­dals is a top-draw­er brand in the lux­u­ry re­sort sec­tor, the ques­tion my work is di­rect­ed to - “What are the ‘Un­der­ly­ing Com­mer­cial Arrange­ments’?” Ray­mond said.

Ad­mit­ting that he thought yes­ter­day’s me­dia con­fer­ence was to an­nounce the sign­ing of the To­ba­go San­dals deal, Ray­mond said he was glad to have been wrong, “Well I am glad to have been wrong since my orig­i­nal guess was that to­day’s (yes­ter­day) meet­ing was go­ing to an­nounce the sign­ing of the To­ba­go San­dals deal. It is not a good thing, be­cause we still do not re­al­ly un­der­stand what has hap­pened here.”

On No­vem­ber 29, 2018, at the first hear­ing of Ray­mond’s Ju­di­cial Re­view of the re­fusal of the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter (OPM) to pro­vide a copy of the To­ba­go San­dals Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MoU) which he had re­quest­ed un­der the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act (FOIA) on Feb­ru­ary 27 2018, the OPM agreed to pro­vide the MoU and pay Ray­mond’s costs.

The MoU was signed on Oc­to­ber 10, 2017, and ini­tial­ly, the pub­lic was told by Row­ley and Young that its de­tails could not be pub­lished as that would un­der­mine the ne­go­ti­a­tions.

How­ev­er, at a sub­se­quent me­dia con­fer­ence, Young dis­closed the doc­u­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to Ray­mond, in the MoU, there were many pos­i­tive fea­tures in favour of San­dals.

Ray­mond ex­plained to the Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that the main red flag in the MoU was the com­i­cal zig-zag­ging be­tween ‘there is no se­cret’ but ‘we can’t breach the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty clause.’

“I even wrote to San­dals to ask for the MoU af­ter they were re­peat­ing how there is no se­cret, but they al­so didn’t want to share. When the MoU was fi­nal­ly re­vealed af­ter my law­suit, the terms were shown to be law­ful with the State mak­ing all the cap­i­tal in­vest­ment; no guar­an­tees or quo­tas as to jobs, sup­pli­ers or ser­vices; Gov­ern­ment agree­ing to prompt­ly pro­vide as many work per­mits as re­quired; trans­fer-pric­ing was be­ing fa­cil­i­tat­ed via this agree­ment and San­dals was plac­ing no cap­i­tal at risk. None. It was re­al­ly To­ba­go Love,” Ray­mond said.

Last year, dur­ing the 2019 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert had iden­ti­fied the San­dals project as a turn­ing point for the To­ba­go econ­o­my with a pro­ject­ed US$80 mil­lion per year in rev­enue (TT$480 mil­lion).

The re­sort was to be built at Buc­coo/Gold­en Grove and owned by the Gov­ern­ment and eq­ui­ty part­ners, but the ho­tel was to be man­aged and op­er­at­ed by San­dals Re­sorts In­ter­na­tion­al. The 1000-room ho­tel was ex­pect­ed to em­ploy some 2000 peo­ple.

Asked of its pro­ject­ed rev­enue, Rain­er made it clear that they have nev­er sat down to ne­go­ti­ate so he was not go­ing to re­lease a num­ber, “be­cause it would just cause a de­bate that is fruit­less.”

He, how­ev­er, not­ed that they would re­turn, “We love Trinidad and To­ba­go…it is a des­ti­na­tion in a Caribbean coun­try, part of the Caribbean from a tourism per­spec­tive will worth it in de­vel­op­ing but we have to have the right en­vi­ron­ment to do so.”

Mi­nor­i­ty Leader of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, Wat­son Duke in thank­ing San­dals for sav­ing To­ba­go’s wet­lands said that they will wel­come them back for re-ne­go­ti­a­tions in the fu­ture but added that they (mean­ing To­ba­go) would “want to have a say in fu­ture ne­go­ti­a­tions.” He said the time was not right now and be­lieves that there was no trans­paren­cy in the process from the start.


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