MP Emmanuel (standing) presenting his address during Friday’s plenary session on the state of affairs at PJIA. Parliament of St. Maarten photo.
~ Several MPs critical of reconstruction ~
PHILIPSBURG--At yesterday’s urgent plenary session of Parliament, Members of Parliament (MPs) used the opportunity to ask Prime Minister Leona Romeo-Marlin, Finance Minister Perry Geerlings and Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) chief executive officer (CEO) Brian Mingo pointed questions about PJIA’s state of affairs.
Several MPs, including some coalition members, requested clarity on the timeline and financing of the reconstruction, the screening process of the airport’s new chief financial officer (CFO), Dutch influence in the reconstruction, and transparency, among other things.
Geerlings, standing in for Tourism, Economic Affairs, Transport and Telecommunication (TEATT) Minister Stuart Johnson who could not attend the meeting, gave a presentation on the airport’s development. He spoke about the ongoing activities of the airport’s project team, organisational developments at PJIA, and the funding and planning for the next phase of the airport’s reconstruction.
Geerlings said that currently there are several major activities of the airport’s project team. One of them is increasing the terminal’s capacity for the winter season, which requires additional seating and facilities. According to Geerlings, this is necessary to accommodate forecast passenger growth – from 60 per cent in 2019 to 80 per cent in 2020 as compared to pre-Hurricane Irma figures.
Regarding organisational developments at PJIA, Geerlings said the airport is currently filling the management and supervisory boards “to ensure that all the necessary expertise is in place during the reconstruction period.”
To this end, Gerben Stavast, formerly of the Schiphol Group, was evaluated for the position of interim CFO and is awaiting a screening process later this month, according to Geerlings.
A local counterpart is to be appointed alongside Stavast, as per an instruction given by government. The recruitment of the local counterpart is ongoing, said Geerlings.
Stavast’s appointment, which was originally set for August 1, has been delayed. However, “Mr. Stavast is already on St. Maarten and is working together with the airport CEO Mr. Brian Mingo in the capacity of financial advisor,” said Geerlings. In the meantime, Mingo will continue as PJIA’s CEO and acting CFO.
On the topic of funding, Geerlings said funds are now sufficient to finance the airport’s complete reconstruction, with the recently awarded arbitration sum of US $71 million and the $100 million loan from the World Bank and the European Investment Bank. PJIA expects that final agreements with both financial institutions can be signed in the coming weeks.
After the completion of current projects, the next phase of reconstruction work will start with a tendering process set for early 2020. This can take three or four months, according to Geerlings. This will be followed by up to 18 months of further reconstruction.
The first speaker to offer questions to the panel was MP Frans Richardson of United St. Maarten Party (US Party), who set the tone for a critical first round of questions. Richardson immediately expressed doubts whether the timeframe for the airport’s reconstruction was too ambitious.
“When I look and see where we are at with the airport, and then when I look at the timeline that it is going to take based on what was presented here to Parliament, you ask yourself, ‘Did not the government know from before how long this process would have been?’ … This shows, from the management side, a total lack of experience and understanding the timeframe that something like this takes,” said Richardson.
Stavast’s current work at the airport, without having passed a screening process for the interim CFO position, was also a point of contention among several of the MPs.
“Is it true … that the CFO is already … sitting in management decision-taking [meetings – Ed.] while the process is not completed? If that was a local St. Maartener, their head would have been chopped off,” said Richardson.
MP Egbert Doran of National Alliance (NA) offered similar sentiments as he queried why no vacancy advertisement had been published for the CFO position, noting instead there will only be a local counterpart to Stavast. “If you ask me, we deserve to be more than counterparts, because there were local people running the airport before,” he said.
“The colonial government and their sympathisers are after our strategic assets that we have built, maintained, financed, operated and ran for all the years,” warned MP Christophe Emmanuel of NA. In his opinion, the Dutch government is purposely “sinking the airport” to drop the value of the bonds so as to be able to buy them cheaply.
According to Emmanuel, after the Dutch government becomes the majority bondholder, they will pump funds back into PJIA, returning it to profitability and “the St. Maarten government will never own it [PJIA] again.”
MP Franklin Meyers of coalition member United Democrats (UD) partly shared this scepticism of Dutch intentions. “I don’t necessarily believe they [the Dutch] want to take over St. Maarten, they want to take over the lucrative things of St. Maarten – the airport, the harbour – those things that generate money,” he said.
He added that transparency was needed in the airport’s reconstruction and called for a forensic audit of PJIA. This was echoed by MP Claude Peterson of St. Maarten Christian Party and Romeo-Marlin. Meyers implored relevant stakeholders to “bombard the community with information” because “the wrong information becomes the truth.”
The panel, headed by Romeo-Marlin and Geerlings, requested one week to consider and provide answers to the questions posed by the MPs.
The date of a follow-up meeting is yet to be determined.
