One of my friends writes: The local press and online media in Aruba are reporting that Quanten LLC does not have “exclusivity rights” any more in Aruba, as of very recently.
Quanten LLC is probably concentrating its effort on the idle T & T oil refinery where Quanten LLC has emerged as the preferred bidder, he adds.
Which is 100% right, because a colleague-reporter from Trinidad called me last week, to ask me to share all my old columns regarding that questionable entity, in order to help him expose the threat they represent, that of milking the country.
He also sent me a Reuters news item reporting that same company is courting Angola, on the west coast of southern Africa, which is the second largest oil producing country in sub-Saharan Africa. Angola is a member of OPEC, a country with a long history of tragic humanitarian crisis, drought and famine, civil war and corruption.
According to our Minister of Energy, we are no longer in bed with Quanten, we are inviting other bed-fellows to apply for RDA’s hand. We are giving others a chance, he said, stating this was plan B&C, hinted at by MinPres, back in the days. How pathetic is that? The defunct RDA is a rust bucket, a worthless ecological threat, a burden on our environment, it is dead, and has been dead for a long time, it is not even worth talking about it.
What pre-screening? We do not believe you have anyone HONEST, standing in line for the privilege of rehabilitating RDA.
Check out the minister’s FB: He reports two groups of interest visited. My colleague-reporter from Trinidad warns against some ‘oil traders,’ masquerading as serious contenders. Careful, he says, they burn.
We have been using KYM for years: Know-Your-Minister is a powerful tool, when reading between the lines. With all due respect, you are again selling air.
Every time the climate around the minister heats up due to irregularities in the handling of permits or unconstitutional HR moves, he takes out the RDA flag, dusts the moth-balls off and waves it around, hoping to divert our attention.
Last week, the Minister of Public Health announced that the suggestion of a most minimal co-pay for medications was again off the table. This has been going on for years, the Dutch suggested a reasonable co-pay, the decision pro a tiny-token co-pay was made, and now again nixed.
The idea of a tiny co-pay is good, and will curb some abuses, and who knows might even bring in some savings, as conditioned by the Dutch.
But our minister just killed it, for fear of voters. He’d rather continue to burden our public health system, than god forbid, endure a bit of political criticism. We collectively continue to pay for his lack of political courage.
The Dutch Secretary of State, Health, Welfare and Sport, VWS, Maarten van Ooijen, will be visiting here next week. St. Martin and Curacao were also invited to Aruba on the occasion, and will jointly sign some agreement, that will probably be ignored.
This is what we know about the Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport: He was born in 1959, and the heavy corona challenges rest on his shoulders. He set up the National Coordination Center in the past two years, for patient distribution, designed to manage ICU beds in the Netherlands. He became one of the best-known faces in the fight against the pandemic. He will spend much more on health, and attempt to lower prices of medicines, focus funds on highly complex care/treatments, in a selection of locations across Netherlands, increase intensive care, and be better prepared for pandemics. Also improve pre-natal care, impose a sugar tax and ELIMINATE the VAT on fruits and veggies. Increase the tax on tobacco, and its products.
