Come clean!

Four senior Government officials on Monday urged Chaps Restaurants Limited to come clean on its accusation that unfair and excessive taxation by the Mia Mottley administration is among the main reasons for its decision to suddenly close three upscale restaurants leaving 150 on the breadline.

In addition to declining visitor spend, Chief Executive Officer Joanne Pooler blamed a 2.5 per cent increase in VAT, an additional five per cent levy on restaurant bills and an “unfair” policy of granting duty free concessions to hotels, which are attached to hotels.

“We are satisfied that what was suggested with respect to the levies and taxes in the sector is not the full story,” said Minister in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment Marsha Caddle moments after exiting a meeting with the representatives of the company’s chairman Andy Stewart.

She also promised that as the Government attempts to get to the bottom of the restaurant’s decision, authorities would also try to provide as much support as possible in the “transition that has to take place”.

But speaking on national radio along with co-finance Minister Ryan Straughn, the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary Roy Morris revealed that according to his information, the real issue surrounds a dispute between the company’s two principal owners, adding that a notice left on the entrances to the three restaurants shed no light on this and other issues.

Morris said: “It makes no reference to the fact that these are three top class restaurants that lost their top class chef and therefore people are talking about the standard of service as well as the standard of food. Then you have the principal owner…left the island last night.

“If there are other issues, you should put all of them on the table.

“Don’t just refer to the financial issues. Refer to the other things and the principal really is a dispute between the two owners.”

He argued that many other restaurants of the same class were overbooked.

But at Cin Cin on the Sea, the oldest of the company’s three restaurants, the CEO denied such suggestions and added that the release was not intended to cast aspersions on Government’s taxation policies.

“From my perspective, there is nothing sinister involved here,” Pooler said, while pointing to the fall of the British Pound.

“We didn’t intend to say that this is the Government’s fault, because it’s not… and certainly things like the duty free concessions that the hotels get, that the stand alone hotels get is not actually the Government’s fault.”

Minister Caddle revealed that Government and tourism stakeholders were extremely close to reconciling the country’s incentives regime and concessions.

She told Barbados TODAY: “We have been looking at this for a long time and we are almost at the point of having an agreed framework.

“It is therefore unfortunate that we are only now hearing of this and all of Barbados is only now waking up to this.

“That is why we had to come and have a conversation with operators to see how we are going to address these potentially dislocated 150 workers and also to find out whether this was a fatal decision and whether it is something from which there is no coming back and that is something the operators will have to make a decision on”.

Caddle added that it was agreed that the restaurant levy was considered to have been “more bearable” in the quest to “equalise” the Value Added Tax.

“Certainly if you drive up and down the coasts of Barbados, you will see that restaurants are full. So there are other issues at play and it is unfortunate that it was framed in the way it was framed,” she said.

The Economic Affairs minister also indicated that new businesses in the local market are forcing players to up their game.

“So I would say that the fact that you have heard other restaurants and operators saying they can make profits and be successful tells us that there is something else to the story,” she stressed again.

Minister of Tourism Kerrie Symmonds argued that the thousands saved when Government slashed corporation tax from 30 per cent to five per cent would have benefitted restaurants like Cin Cin by the Sea, Hugo’s Barbados and Prime Bar and Bistro.