The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A trade union leader yesterday said achieving a resolution to the Cabbage Beach ‘access’ row was being complicated because the Minister of Tourism was not speaking to the vendors’ association.

Obie Ferguson, the Trades Union Congress’s (TUC) president, told Tribune Business that Obie Wilchcombe was not involving the Cabbage Beach Business Owners Association in what the Government’s was doing to resolve the highly-charged dispute.

He said the minister, and by extension, the Government, were dealing with persons who had fought - and lost - a recent court case against the Association and its president, Monique Taylor.

As a result, Mr Ferguson said those representing the majority of Cabbage Beach vendors were being ‘kept in the dark’ about the progress of the Government’s negotiations over access rights with Atlantis’s owner, Brookfield Asset Management.

He told Tribune Business that, for example, the Association finally realised Atlantis/Brookfield did not own the property containing the ‘beach access’ path on January 5, 2016, when the latter’s attorneys, Harry B Sands & Lobosky, filed documents in the Supreme Court.

And it was the same filing that alerted Mr Ferguson and his clients to the deal Mr Wilchcombe had struck with the property’s new owner, Access Industries, which said on December 29 that the last 60-day extension before closure was “final and in no circumstance subject to further extensions.”

The letter, sent by David Johnstone, attorney and partner at Lennox Paton, is signed by Mr Wilchcombe above the words ‘terms agreed’, indicating that the Minister had bound the Government to developing an alternative beach access with Atlantis by end-February 2016.

Access Industries, the One & Only Ocean Club, subsequently relented this week, presumably after further pleadings by Prime Minister Perry Christie and Mr Wilchcombe, following the protests and subsequent political firestorm that the closure triggered.

Mr Ferguson, meanwhile, said efforts to achieve a resolution were being made more difficult because Mr Wilchcombe and the Government were “not speaking to the right party”.

“They appear to be dealing with someone other than the Cabbage Beach Business Owners Association,” he told Tribune Business. “They were dealing with Ruby Saunders, as though she was the legitimate representative of the Association.

“They’ve been meeting with her as opposed to meeting with Megan Taylor. In effect, what we’re saying is that to meet with Ruby Saunders is of no effect. The Association is an affiliate of the TUC, and we should have been in that meeting with the Minister.

“Obviously, the Minister negotiated for himself or somebody else, but he couldn’t have been doing it for the Association,” Mr Ferguson added.

“We were not privy to what was going on. That’s what he continues to do, and that’s creating a serious problem. He’s giving the impression he’s in contact with the right party, but he’s not. If there’s going to be a resolution of the matter, it has to be with the proper parties.”

The TUC leader said Mr Wilchcombe had contacted him to say he would call to discuss the matter, but this had yet to occur when Tribune Business spoke to him at mid-afternoon yesterday.

Mr Ferguson produced court documents showing a January 18, 2016, Supreme Court Order made in a case brought by Ms Saunders and two others against the Association and Ms Taylor.

It discharged a November 2015 Order and injunction granted in favour of Ms Saunders and her co-plaintiffs, in a case that Mr Ferguson said was brought to prevent the Association from holding an election.

Other documents show the union’s 2015 election results and Certificate of Registration with the Department of Labour.

Mr Ferguson said “the significance” of the Association’s seeming exclusion from the access discussions was that it “was never told by the Minister that he was negotiating a 60-day period for them [vendors] to operate, after which there would be no further extension”.

This, he added, only came to the Association’s attention when Harry B Sands filed the Lennox Paton letter as part of the exhibits to Atlantis’s evidence.

In that letter, Mr Johnstone refers to a December 22 meeting with Mr Wilchcombe, in which he - on Access Industries’ behalf - seemingly advanced the argument that it was Atlantis/Brookfield’s responsibility to provide alternative access to Cabbage Beach.

“We felt it was a productive meeting which allowed you to better focus on the Brookfield role in finding a solution to the ‘vendors’’ relocation on Cabbage Beach,” Mr Johnstone wrote.

He confirmed that the One & Only Ocean Club owner was willing to grant a 60-day extension before it closed the “public access” way across its Casino Drive property, albeit with terms and conditions attached.

These involved the Government, “agreeing and acknowledging”, that based on Brookfield’s “contractual obligations” to Access Industries, the Government would work with the Atlantis owner to develop a solution within the two-month timeframe.

The Government and Brookfield were to keep Access Industries informed of their progress, and the former was “not to make any public statements/press releases that directly or indirectly suggest that Access or its Bahamian-registered affiliates are responsible for the relocation of the public beach access”.

Access Industries’ position is that as part of the deal for its One & Only Ocean Club purchase, and acquisition of the Casino Drive land containing the ‘beach access’ path, Atlantis/Brookfield took responsibility for finding an alternative that was more convenient than the existing routes at the beach’s eastern end.

Access Industries is understood to be eyeing the development of a convention centre on that land.

Mr Johnstone’s letter concluded: “As Access has been exceedingly co-operative to date with granting extensions of the public beach access closure, I have been instructed to emphasise that the 60-day period is final, and in no circumstance subject to further extensions.”

Mr Ferguson yesterday said it was only then that the Association realised the ‘beach access’ land no longer belonged to Atlantis subsidiary, the Island Hotel Company.

Conveyancing documents showed that the land had been sold to Access Industries’ subsidiary, A. I. Land (Bahamas) on June 4, 2014.

Yet Mr Ferguson said that vendors had subsequently continued to receive letters and correspondence from Atlantis as if it was still the owner.