When you lie to the Business Investors you ‘Own the lies’ when it all goes wrong
by Peter Binose
When Ralph Gonsalves announced the finish and operational dates for the Argyle International Airport, we must ask ourselves if he knew each of those dates was unachievable. I like many others believe he did know that the completion dates he gave us were not just unachievable, he knew that such statements were downright lies.
When you tell lies sooner or later your very own lies will come back and bite you in the arse, as the old folk would say.
Saying the airport would definitely be up and running by 2011 may very well have caused all sorts of business people who were ardent followers of Gonsalves, to invest money in their business’s to take advantage of the upswing in trade that the same Gonsalves claimed would follow the airport opening.
He also told the people that he would build a city on the Arnos Vale site when the air traffic was transferred to Argyle. He said the new city would be linked to the old city of Kingstown by a four lane tunnel under the hill, it doesn’t matter that approaching the tunnel from either end it would only be one lane. The whole matter was embroidered to wind the business people into spending money.
Hotels in Villa who are ULP supporters have invested fortunes in upgrading their family owned hotels in anticipation of the Gonsalves forecast of a huge surge in stop over’s and business in general.
People like Ken Boyer borrowed money from banks to build his supermarket and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, why? because as a cousin to Gonsalves he believed that Gonsalves would finish the airport by 2011 and the new city would be finished five years after that in 2016. Ken was a little silly because he should have known better than most of Gonsalves ability to make things up, to embroider the truth and make it into blatant lies.
The Harlequin Buccament Bay Project based all its plans on the airport opening in 2011, they have also been shafted and they must be seriously in danger of folding because the airport is the key to much of their projected business. They were made promises and are now suffering from lies.
In Saint Vincent there are only so many customers for the business proprietors to draw on. Building a second city will bring about the certain collapse of SVG. If you double the number of business premises without trebling the number of buying clients no business can survive. Most of the Kingstown business’s are in serious financial trouble today, most will not be able to invest in the new city and therefore new companies from the region will be brought in to invest in Arnos Vale. That will kill Kingstown and destroy the existing business community on mass. Let there be no doubt a second city will destroy our nation even if it is linked to Kingstown by a very silly ten lane tunnel.
The Syrians and also the Chinese in Kingstown are in serious trouble right now and several shops and stores are on the verge of closing down.
The new international airport is being built too far away from the ferry terminal at Kingstown and we can expect that new shuttle air services will become established, Grenada and the Grenadines, Barbados and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia and the Grenadines. Why fly to Saint Vincent when you cannot get a ferry without staying overnight, at a great cost and increased time in arriving at your final destination. Almost all tourists want to go to the Grenadines, Bequia, Union & Mayreau, Palm Island [who are about to build their own airstrip] and Canouan with its newly extended runway for up to 240 seat jet aircraft landing and takeoff facility. Saint Vincent itself may well be a minor destination in the scheme of things.
The Argyle airport has no capable emergency hospital facility within its curtilage or within an achievable quickly reached distance. Currently if more than a half dozen emergency cases arrive at Kingstown hospital in one day, it would take up to 20 hours to attend to some of them. It has no provision for rescue boats or rescue helicopters, if there is an aircraft down in the sea, it will be good night nurse for all the passengers.
A new medical facility at Georgetown is five years late in completion, and when it’s finished it will not be capable of treating large numbers of injured people. It’s also built close to a live volcano which is overdue in its eruption cycle. A medical facility which itself may require some form of emergency evacuation in the future.
The whole matter of failed completion dates may be laid at the door of the Cubans who have taken a three year projects and taken ten years to complete it and its still not complete. You cannot blame them, they were chosen on an ideological basis by Gonsalves.
The whole airport project at Argyle and all the future projects such as new cities and tunnels are based on lies and evil. The land owners at Argyle, 150 of them still haven’t been paid for their land, you can’t be more evil than that. Business people have been lied to and sold a pup, told and encouraged to invest at a premature time. Then Gonsalves denies it is anything to do with him when firms collapse under the load of carrying his lies to their banks and borrowing money against them.
If it were a private person or a business leader that had told such untruths they may well have been accused of deception and prosecuted. Because as a Prime Minister perhaps he carries some protection against prosecution. One thing for sure we would have to get such a prosecution past the DPP first. But he can be subjected to a no confidence action within parliament, without the intervention of the DPP. Questions central to the philosophical discussion of lying to others and other-deception (or interpersonal deceiving) may be divided into two kinds. Questions of the first kind are definitional. They include the questions of how lying is to be defined, and how deceiving is to be defined, and whether lying is a form of intended deception. Questions of the second kind are moral. They include the questions of whether lying and deceiving are (defeasibly) morally wrong, and whether, if either lying or deception, or both, are defeasibly morally wrong, they are ever morally obligatory, and not just merely morally permissible.
Wake up people when PM Ralph E. Gonsalves told us he sometimes tells lies, that may have been one of the few occasions that he told the truth.
Barbados Free Press 
THE PM of SVG is not better than the PM of Barbados , they both might have the same fathers,
Going to CUBA for eye operations, Houses built with no steel, elections after elections lies to stay in office about the airport soon done, counterfeit money,paid out for votes buying at night when the lights are low,,, Seem they not had land laundering money like Barbados, Selling off land in Bequia at a records rate , selling off and selling out , We dont think he will live long with out being in power,The mental and the greed and greedy even in the police dept is no better than Barbados.
People with better sense knew this airport could never happen, what big international airline would go to St. Vincent with 10 0r 12 passengers, Barbados have to pay some of these airlines to come here, a waste of taxpayers hard earn money, so this is what our politicians in the Caribbean do, waste our money with stupid decisions.
I have to agree with one of the writers. I must say all those people who went ahead and invested their hard earn money in the so call international airport are all fools.There is no way that airstrip will bring back one red cent to SVG. Barbados is right at the goal net blocking every thing. No airline would be going to SVG with twenty five passengers.
But wait and see that when the Argyle airport is up and running and LIAT is relocated to BARBADOS, that Gonzales, like the Trinis, will shout Boo!!! and easily take away LIAT from Barbados. Gonzales is not a fool. It is easier to bully Barbados and it leaders , than those in Antigua.
What a bunch of codswaddle by the pseudo journalist Peter Binose and the pretend commenters here who all seem to be from the same school for dunce that Mr Binose is a graduate!
Regardless of if the airport is late or not trying to taint the PM with smears and petty innuendoes about lies is rather laughable.
This is the same mr Binoose who not so long ago proclaimed that the AIA was unsafe and was built with inferior methods and that the runway was below the main concourse etc, he is the same Mr Binose who in his own words used his binoculars and spied and see the shabby works, and know an engineer who declared that the AIA is built below international standards and would fail inspections, now that none of these seem to be fact, here is another curve ball to steer people away from a terrible disservice to journalism! I put it to Mr Binose that it is he indeed who is a fabricator of the truth and he has been lying all along!
Only fools and uneducated people would read the trash here and believe it for indeed reality is the AIA is nearing completion and Mr Binose is nervous of this! Good I say and leave the people of SVG to determine their own destiny! Shame on you! Shame on you!!!
I think that Harlequin was in trouble from the very beginning, regardless of the delays to the construction of the airport. There never was a sustainable project in trying to immediately launch a 1200+ room resort given the minimal infrastructure in place and with no research or evidence that there was any demand in the region for such a product. It appears that the business model was not only flawed but probably illegal too – see http://www.professionaladviser.com/professional-adviser/news/2401491/appeal-court-ruling-raises-fresh-questions-over-harlequin-advice