The old order is yielding
National Alliance went for the jugular yesterday as its Island Council members championed the cause of good corporate governance. Their target of choice was Democratic Party Island Council member and Commissioner responsible for Telecommunications Maria Buncamper-Molanus.
Yesterday’s meeting will probably be considered one of the watershed meetings in the history of the council, because it brought to the fore in a very telling manner the need for the old order to yield place to the new, and one should be very surprised if the impact of the debate does not serve to ensure that insofar as good governance and conflict of interest situations are concerned, it is no longer “business as usual” in St. Maarten.
We have said before in this space that the fact that the commissioner in charge of telecommunications and her husband, who is a member of the TelEm board, are no longer board members of The Sky is The Limit Foundation does not alter the fact that they were closely involved in setting up the foundation and in requesting a US $25,000 donation from government-owned TelEm for the “From Us to You” Calypso show in April.
But there were some very noteworthy developments during yesterday’s debate that saw Buncamper-Molanus virtually under siege with neither of the two other DP members present – Sarah Wescot-Williams and Roy Marlin – offering her any verbal support on the floor and certainly leaving the impression that they were both distancing themselves from her – at least in this particular matter.
That National Alliance remained emphatic that the honourable councilwoman still had been president of The Sky is the Limit Foundation when the request was made for the funds, together with the fact that she had merely skirted around that issue, left many unanswered questions, leading one to believe that someone must have been deliberately steering clear of the truth.
With Commissioners Theo Heyliger and Louie Laveist and DP Councilman Leroy de Weever absent from yesterday’s meeting (with the absence of the latter two in particular causing raised eyebrows), Buncamper-Molanus narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence through a legal technicality.
We do not believe that we have heard the last of this matter, especially because the information gathered by the Lt. Governor as the shareholder’s representative was not presented to yesterday’s meeting and will only be discussed by the Executive Council today, and especially because this matter is still to be examined and pronounced on by the governor of the Netherlands Antilles.
From our vantage point, we say that whatever the eventual outcome, yesterday’s debate was good for St. Maarten. The old order is yielding to the new, as indeed, it must.
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