Dear Reader
On the morning of September 6th, 2017, ladies and gentleman, do you know where your children were? If not, you may want to check the photo below of youngsters breaking into Boolchand's store on Frontstreet to see if your son is not one of those youngsters. If you recognize your son in between any of them, do the right thing and bring him down to the police station.
The news coming out of Holland yesterday is that the country has a new coalition government. We are curious how this bodes for St. Maarten with yet another threat of an instruction hanging over the government of St. Maarten's head. Why? Because this government does not want to accept conditions for accepting recovery and rebuilding funds.
The Integrity Chamber has been deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court after submission for review was sent in by our own capable and competent Ombudsman, Nilda Arduin, who has just recently been re-appointed for another term by our Parliament of St. Maarten. So the condition to have the IC implemented as a prerequisite for aid is a non-issue. However, the condition to have our border control augmented by members of the Royal Marechaussee certainly has merits.
Where we have issues is not with
how the funds will be disbursed, but with
where it will be spent. To better explain what we mean, we will invite economists and other experts to contribute articles to feed the debate on that discussion.
The rainy weather these past couple of days has proven to be meritorious as TelEm has now announced that due to - among other reasons - the rainy weather, the telecommunications company has extended its payment deadline to Monday, October 16th. See the news items below in this email newsletter.
The Cft has postponed its visit to St. Maarten. Under the present circumstances justifiably understandable. So we will bring you a series of articles on their visits to the other islands of Curacao, Bonaire and Aruba.
Finally, in a letter to the editor an interesting question has been posed: Are we ready for Independence? Hurricane Irma has proven we are not. Read why
here.
