The junking of Palm Beach is about two decades old.
Instead of becoming an elegant shopping street, a la Champs Elysee and Rodeo Drive, kiosks and shacks, started dotting the rickety sidewalks, all offering the same cheap towels and tees, souvenirs from Haiti dishonestly masquerading as made in Aruba. Some of those shacks are owned by mini entrepreneurs, some are minimum wage vendors, hired by some landlord to peddle wares while he relaxes in the air-conditioning.
The heap of junk on the sidewalk across Playa Linda Beach Resort has always been especially offensive.
The sidewalk heaves under the weight of redundant merchandise, the gutters are filled with cigarette butts, the floor tiles chipped and broken.
Someone is making money off that shameful bazaar, without lifting a finger to take care of the place. Who? The owner of the Hacidena Mall, better known these days as P.T.A.S., a sentenced offender, in a criminal case.
P.T.A.S. is a former civil servant at DOW, the public works department, he was sentenced in the first instance to 2 years in jail, of which 1 is conditional, for bribery and money laundering.
Because of, alas, a sloppy investigation, he was partially acquitted from the charge of active bribery of the minister of infrastructure. A special condition was also imposed on him, namely, he cannot apply for or obtain options on commercial leaseholds for a period of 3 years.
Which means he was banned from future feasting, and a sum of 1.3 million dollars, which stuck to his finger, was confiscated. Because the Public Prosecution Service had previously demanded an unconditional prison sentence of 4 years, it was disappointed with the actual sentence, and filed an appeal.
P.T.A.S was one of TWELVE rotten apples investigated under the case name Avestrus, Ostrich. The Public Prosecution Service viewed the decisions of the judge, in the first instance, in the P.T.A.S. case, as wrong, and disagreed with the sentences imposed.
I found this story especially irksome. An ambtenaar, meaning a trusted government employee, on staff high up there in the department of Public Works, privy to inside information regarding high-demand etfpacht, lease land, exploiting his position for personal gains, and because of being chummy with the minister, he was able to amass a great deal of lucrative real estate, while hardly ever showing up in the office — he had to attend to his various personal investments, didn’t he?
I am telling you all that because this week the same entity who junked Palm Beach, went to court to ask our legal system to remove all kiosks and shacks off its real estate because, monkey-see, monkey-do, it now needed to build an outdoor bar, the likes of Fat Tuesday and Mambo Jumbo.
The irony kills me.
Instead of being a good steward for the land, the developer built an ugly mall, populated it with nothing stores, rented out every square inch of the sidewalk, mind you, public domain, to kiosks, at Awg 2,000. Who collects the rent, perhaps the government for the use of the street, AND now wants the riff-raff removed for the purpose of building yet another watering hole.
The island spent millions trying to nail those who did business with national patrimony, it was only partially successful.

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