The Tribune

By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

THE roughly 200 former Baha Mar employees hired by or through The Hobby Horse Company will have to wait out the ongoing payout process to learn their fate, as Claims Committee personnel deliberate over how best to handle the “precarious” group.

Moving to clarify recent press reports in which he claimed he was “not familiar” with the third-party entity, Claims Committee Chairman James Smith said his committee has devoted a considerable amount of time and effort working toward a conclusion on how to handle this set of employees.

On Wednesday, Mr Smith told Tribune Business that no one was going to be turned away from the process.

However, repositioning that claim, Mr Smith on Thursday said his committee would have to resolve all outstanding matters with the primary 2,000 former employees directly employed with the resort, prior to any discussion with the smaller group.

Mr Smith said while the specifics of the organisation and its connection to the stalled resort still had not been “completely hashed-out,” his mandate is to handle the employees listed on his committee’s payout registry, and once that process concludes, committee officials would shift focus to the estimated 200 former employees on an “individual basis”.

“We have communicated with several persons in that precarious grouping,” stated Mr Smith. “We are working diligently to completely hash out the Hobby Horse connection, we aren’t there yet; we are close.”

Mr Smith said the company operated as a hiring and training agency for the $3.5bn property, where potential employees would enlist to improve their skills and once completed, became eligible for a post at the resort.

“These are the persons who are still kind of wanting to get something out of this situation. They are holding firm to the claim that they were employees, but there isn’t any data that supports that. But we want to help them where we can.

“Whatever we are capable of doing within our mandate, we will bend over backwards to help them,” Mr Smith said.

The Claims Committee has projected that 1,250 former employees have gone through the process and have received payouts.

The committee is aiming to service roughly 90 to 95 per cent of the resort’s former employees.

On Tuesday, a number of former employees suggested to reporters that they were satisfied with the amounts they had received during the first day of the Claims Committee’s payout exercise at the Crystal Palace Hotel Casino.

However, there were some former workers who expressed issues with the process, with one, speaking on condition of anonymity, alleging that it wasn’t clear what the payout represented, and that nothing was mentioned about pension payments.

On Sunday, Mr Smith advised employees not to worry if payments did not match the amount listed on their redundancy letters. He urged workers with discrepancies to bring in the letter they received from the resort’s human resources department upon their termination as the committee was prepared to deal with any dispute.

Mr Smith leads a five-person committee appointed by the government.

Financing for the payouts is coming from the China Export-Import Bank - the resort’s main financier.

There is no clarity over how much the bank put into the payout scheme.