The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A major Bahamian events planner yesterday voiced concern about the “horrible situation” facing its staff and other workers due to delays in National Insurance Board (NIB) benefit payouts.

Tony Appleyard, Wildflowers Events & Occasions co-founder, told Tribune Business the company had been forced to lay-off its 100-strong staff after the tourist-related weddings and corporate events upon which it relied were shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet despite supplying NIB all necessary information to facilitate unemployment benefit payments, Mr Appleyard said payouts had been inconsistent with some staff receiving two to-date, others one and some none at all.

Revealing that some workers had yesterday reported receiving their third NIB payment, with the first fortnightly payout having been received on April 7, he added that conversations with other businesses and employers suggested “everyone is in the same boat”.

“We’ve had about 100 employees we’ve had to lay-off because we have zero business,” Mr Appleyard told this newspaper. “Our business depends on foreigners coming in for weddings and corporate events. Our human resources people were very diligent about getting everything submitted, and a number of people received their first benefit on April 7.

“The second one should have come through on April 26 or somewhere around there, but there’s been no payment since then. My concern is obviously for my employees, but everybody seems to be in the same boat. What do they do? It’s just a horrible situation.

“Some of our employees haven’t got a penny, yet some received a couple of payments. I’ve made calls to people at NIB, and on the last call they said our staff would be paid. They said it was because they were all so busy at NIB. They said it would go out last Friday, but Friday came and went and nothing happened.”

Mr Appleyard said one employee had informed him they received a third payment yesterday, which he suggested was likely the one due for end-April/beginning of May, which coincided with NIB’s decision to open facilities at the Thomas A. Robinson stadium and call persons to come and collect their benefits.

Unable to comprehend the weeks’ long delay, Mr Appleyard added: “Once they get the first payment, why isn’t it just like a standing order. You’d think if they got it right it would be a standing order with the same bank. If one has to sit there and pull the trigger...

“I get text messages and What’s App messages from our people, how are you doing and what have you, but I know damn well they’re hurting and have to be hurting. They’re totally reliant on these benefits. Our income has literally gone to zero.”

Mr Appleyard is far from alone in his NIB-related concerns, even though the Government earlier this week was touting that the nation’s social security system had paid out some $28.7m in unemployment benefits to 26,000 claimants as at mid-May.

“Additionally, NIB issued $6.2m million in payments to approximately 6,100 recipients of the Government’s unemployment assistance initiative for self-employed individuals impacted by COVID-19,” the Ministry of Finance added.

However, Tara Morley, co-president of The Bahamas Federation of Retailers, charged last week that NIB is not paying unemployment benefits to all approved applications. She said: “ Almost none of us have received for our employees NIB payments, so our employees are begging to come back to work but we are not being allowed to open our doors. It is their money they have been contributing to NIB for years and they are not getting paid.

“Where is that $28m worth of NIB payments going? Because it is not going to the small business owners. I can tell you that some of the larger businesses of our membership, those are the only ones that I know that their employees have received their benefits.

“I’m not saying nobody has received the benefits, but it tends to be the larger companies. So where I have smaller members that maybe only employ five persons, and even with the members where they have ten different boutiques, I can tell you that out of our ten companies we have 45 employees. Only two out of the 45 have received the benefit, or if we have 21 employees only three out of the 21 have received the benefit.”

And Neal Watson, owner of Neal Watson’s Bimini Scuba Centre, also confirmed none of his employees have received their unemployment benefits. He said: “None of them have received anything yet. They have all put in their own applications but they had to come get the paperwork from us first. We have done this from last month some time. I would say most people would have had their paperwork in from about four weeks ago at least.”

Mr Appleyard, meanwhile, said Wildflowers had suffered the cancellation of all corporate events and weddings that had been on its books pre-COVID-19. With deposits to clients refunded, he added: “I’ve never seen anything like this.

“No one could have experienced this anywhere in The Bahamas or the world. It’s the most horrific situation. It’s something out of a film that someone with a wild imagination came up with. Where does it end? How does it end?

“Being so totally dependent on the US, Canada and the UK, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do. Until flights open up and hotels open, and people have the ability and courage to travel......” Mr Appleyard said he was especially concerned that US corporate earnings are “going to suffer horrendously” as a result of COVID-19 because this client base was responsible for generating a significant amount of Wildflowers’ business.

He explained that the company frequently catered to corporate conferences, meetings and events to reward staff for sales performance that often attracted between 500 to 1,000 guests. “We did an awful lot of work at Baha Mar, Atlantis and the Ocean Club,” the Wildflowers chief said. “Even if everything opens up it will be a while before that type of business that we were seeing since Baha Mar opened up comes back.

“It was booming up until February/March. If someone in January had said that three months down the road we would have no business.... We’ve been prudent so we can sustain it. We have the ongoing expenses of a 40,000 square foot warehouse, maintenance that needs to be done, and there’s still electricity and bills that need to be paid.”