Cabinet responds to slow project development claims

The opposition’s repeated criticisms of the Gaston Browne – administration’s promised job-creating hotel development projects prompted the social transformation minster to defend the government’s management.
Minister Samantha Marshall said, “It is important that we understand that you have to go through a phase, jobs do not automatically go on stream, it has to be a situation that we have to allow investors to do the preparatory work and then to begin the building phase.”
She added that the upcoming year would be very active, but both opposition parties, United Progressive Party (UPP) and the Democratic National Alliance (DNA) dispute the government’s creation of economic activity and jobs.
Senator Damani Tabor, UPP public relations offer, made reference to an article published by this paper in December 2015, in which the prime minister is quoted as saying, “A 500-room resort will be built in the next 60 days and they have assured us that by the middle of next year they will employ up to 1,000 individuals.”
The resort in question was proposed by the Sunwing Corporation to be built in the proximity of its other hotel, the Royal Antiguan, but Tabor labelled the pronouncement by PM Browne as “madness and lunacy” citing that a resort of that scale could not be completed in two months.
“The point I’m making with this (Daren) is that this administration can’t be trusted, their timelines never hold true. We still do not have the Hodge’s Bay Club open or the Marble Hill business hotel,” he said on OBSERVER’s morning programme.
(More in today’s Daily Observer)