The ar­rest of Blue Wa­ters ex­ec­u­tive chair­man Do­minic Hadeed, along with his wife Genevieve and Genevieve’s rel­a­tive Star Sab­ga has trig­gered height­ened pub­lic at­ten­tion, but in­dus­try play­ers main­tain that the com­pa­ny’s day-to-day op­er­a­tions have re­mained un­af­fect­ed, with dis­tri­b­u­tion and sup­ply con­tin­u­ing un­in­ter­rupt­ed across T&T.

The three were ar­rest­ed last week in con­nec­tion with al­le­ga­tions that they con­spired to mur­der se­nior Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials.

For­mer pres­i­dent of the Su­per­mar­kets As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (SATT) Ra­jiv Diptee said from a re­tail and dis­tri­b­u­tion stand­point, the com­pa­ny’s ac­tiv­i­ties re­main un­changed.

“Their trucks (Blue Wa­ters) con­tin­ue to op­er­ate as nor­mal for de­liv­ery routes with or­ders from cus­tomers,” said Diptee, who is al­so a di­rec­tor of Plaza Com­plex Stop N Shop Su­per­mar­ket Ltd in south Trinidad.

Diptee said de­liv­er­ies to su­per­mar­kets and oth­er out­lets are pro­ceed­ing as sched­uled.

“The trucks vis­it the stores, and we al­so have the sales reps that come in. Or­ders con­tin­ue to be processed.”

He stressed that the com­pa­ny’s com­mer­cial re­la­tion­ships have not been af­fect­ed, with es­tab­lished fi­nan­cial arrange­ments still in place.

“Nor­mal cred­it and pay­ment cy­cles ap­ply, and as I say, they are a val­ued part­ner in the in­dus­try,” he ex­plained.

Diptee al­so point­ed out that there has been no for­mal in­dus­try re­sponse to iso­late the com­pa­ny.

“We con­tin­ue to do busi­ness with the com­pa­ny. The ac­tiv­i­ties of the com­pa­ny, in my opin­ion, have not been im­pact­ed where no­body has black­list­ed them,” Diptee said.

Own­er of A&N Su­per­mar­ket in San­gre Grande, Anil Juter­am, al­so ex­pressed con­fi­dence in the com­pa­ny’s abil­i­ty to re­main op­er­a­tional de­spite the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.

He de­scribed Blue Wa­ters as hav­ing a strong or­gan­i­sa­tion­al foun­da­tion ca­pa­ble of with­stand­ing lead­er­ship chal­lenges.

“I think that the struc­ture and the foun­da­tion of Blue Wa­ters is very sol­id and very man­age­r­i­al-cen­tred, so I don’t an­tic­i­pate any­thing more than what you know about in terms of their ser­vices,” he said.

He not­ed that Blue Wa­ters is both a sig­nif­i­cant em­ploy­er and a con­trib­u­tor to for­eign ex­change earn­ings.

Juter­am al­so urged against draw­ing broad con­clu­sions about in­di­vid­u­als or groups in light of the sit­u­a­tion say­ing, “You don’t broad brush a whole per­cent­age of peo­ple and la­bel them as a one per cent and give the mantra that all of them are bad. Be­cause it pains me,” Juter­am said.

Oth­er su­per­mar­ket own­ers, speak­ing off the record, said they too have not seen any de­cline in sales of Blue Wa­ters prod­ucts.