KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent– Finance Minister Camillo Gonsalves says former workers of the Buccament Bay Resort are to receive a pay soon out of EC$2,000 (One EC dollar=US 0.37 cents) each.
The resort closed its doors in December 2016, and Gonsalves said that the money to be paid by the government is from EC$732,180 raised through an auction of the contents of the resort after its sale last year to the Jamaica-based Sandals Resorts International (SRI).
Gonsalves said he had signed a special warrant on Monday for the pay-out.
“It’s not strictly volcano, but it helps; every little bit helps,” he said.
“As the honorable house knows, in the disposition of the property, the items at the former Buccament Bay Resort, a lot of those items were sold by auction,” Gonsalves said as he presented a EC$117.9 million supplementary budget in response to last month’s explosive eruption of La Soufriere volcano.
“When you take out the fees to the auctioneer when you take out the salary for the security and other staff that helped in the auction, we raised a total of EC$732,180 from the sale of those items, and we are going to distribute that money evenly among everyone who was employed at the Buccament resort at the time of its closure.
“That means that each person at the resort will get, likely, a cheque over $2,000 as an ex-gratia payment. The government doesn’t owe them that money, but recognizing their difficulty, each one of them will get the check-in excess of $2,000 in recognition of their hard work,” the Finance Minister said.
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