St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has defended Sandals’ investment on the island and voiced disappointment with those who, he claims, are criticising the giant hotel brand located in Buccament Bay.
Gonsalves stated that misinformation and unfounded allegations about the benefits of Sandals for farmers, fisherman, and taxi drivers are repeated on talk shows and by those in opposition.
Temperatures rose further over the weekend after the St. Vincent Times published a story stating that ‘Island Routes’, a tour business operated by Sandals, will commence operations in St. Vincent.
Gonsalves, speaking on NBC Radio on Wednesday, stated that Sandals had five or six talks with taxi and minibus companies regarding transportation.
“Overwhelmingly, the people who are being moved from the airport to the hotel and back are local taxi-men, and the people who are doing the tours in the tour buses, taxi and minibus operators, etc. are overwhelmingly local providers of these services.”
“The five-star hotels always have specific facilities for VVIPs, for which they will make their own transportation arrangements. Sandals will require a big fleet of motor vehicles to transport people from the airport to Sandals and back, and common sense shows this would require local input,” Gonsalves said.
Gonsalves said Sandals also had consultations with fishermen and farmers.
“Hotels of that kind, as a matter of policy, do not buy from a multiplicity of individual suppliers. Suppliers have to put themselves together, or somebody else has to put them together. Selling to Sandals would require items to be properly packaged, as they must be brought in a condition where they are assured of quality.”
“The idea that you can pull up your boat on the shores of Sandals and sell 15 pounds of tuna, 20 pounds of snapper, and a few pounds of jacks and robin, No. Rainforest Seafoods, which buys fish, lobster, and conch not from people on Mars or people in Brazil or Timbuktu, but from fishermen and women in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, I feel absolutely sure that if 15 fishermen, 10 fishermen, and 5 fishermen in a cooperative decide to do an operation and they have the necessary resources and they want to sell directly to them, I’m sure that they will purchase. But you have to maintain the standards.”
Gonsalves, who has indicated that he does not wish to work as a public relations officer for Rayneau Gadjadhar, a St. Lucian investor, has stated that the criticisms levelled at him are simply unjustified. “He is an OECS citizen,” Gonsalves stated.
“How would Vincentians feel if they went elsewhere in the Caribbean to invest and people called them foreigners? A man named Rayneau, who is a St. Lucian, comes here; his first agreement is for the quarry down in Richmond. Of course, COVID came; volcanic eruptions, political melees, and other things deterred him. I am told they are going to start selling stones and aggregate from April into May. In the meantime, Rayneau, who has a good nose for business, sees an opportunity to aggregate agricultural products. They must stop it.”
Sandals will hold a soft opening for the VIII Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) on March 1, 2024, before formally opening on March 27.
