The co-own­ers and for­mer pre­sumed ten­ants of the Break­fast Shed have threat­ened le­gal ac­tion against the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UDe­COTT) over what they de­scribe as the “un­law­ful clo­sure” of the pop­u­lar Port of Spain eatery.

In a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter sent by their at­tor­ney Ken­neth Munroe Brown, the ven­dors ac­cused UDe­COTT’s Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer, Tam­i­ca Charles, of mis­lead­ing both the board and the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty by deny­ing that evic­tion no­tices were is­sued.

The let­ter claims that Ms Charles “bul­lied, in­tim­i­dat­ed and hound­ed” the ven­dors out of their busi­ness­es, forc­ing them to close un­der “duress and ha­rass­ment.”

Brown wrote, “Our Cham­bers calls out Ms Charles as be­ing guilty of hav­ing bul­lied, in­tim­i­dat­ed and hound­ed our clients out of their busi­ness op­er­a­tion to the ex­tent that un­der the pres­sure of duress and ha­rass­ment their busi­ness­es have fold­ed.”

The at­tor­ney re­mind­ed UDe­COTT that the ven­dors’ rights re­main in­tact de­spite the clo­sure of the fa­cil­i­ty, point­ing to a long-term lease re­quest pre­vi­ous­ly sub­mit­ted. He added that the ven­dors had made con­struc­tive pro­pos­als in a let­ter dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 9, but said the CEO “chose the path of con­flict and con­fu­sion.”

The let­ter al­so ref­er­enced as­sur­ances al­leged­ly giv­en by for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning in 2005, when the ven­dors were first dis­placed.

Ac­cord­ing to Brown, each cook was promised $500,000 in com­pen­sa­tion but on­ly $100,000 was paid, leav­ing an out­stand­ing bal­ance of $400,000 per cook. With 15 af­fect­ed cooks, the un­paid sum now stands at $6 mil­lion, ex­clu­sive of in­ter­est and costs.