Eighty percent of merchants’ kids fled TT

About 80 percent of the business owners in San Juan have sent their children abroad in the past year because of fears of being kidnapped, according to San Juan Business Association (SJBA) president, Gail Merhair.

This was disclosed at a news conference held by Pointe-a-Pierre MP Gillian Lucky at her Edward Street law office, called to highlight concerns about Wednesday’s kidnapping of Shamshoon Moha-mmed, a worker in the San Juan area. Merhair said her organisation had some 150 members located between Morvant and the Grand Bazaar, and that in light of 12 kidnappings in the area, a whopping 75 to 80 percent of members had already sent their children abroad. Merhair said: “Businessmen’s wives are telling them that they don’t want to stay in Trinidad. You have sisters, daughters, and mothers, and how do you feel when they are violated?! Women are telling their husbands ‘I don’t care what we are working hard for, I want to be with my children, abroad.” She said kidnapping had caused a capital flight from Trinidad and Tobago, and a brain-drain noticeable in the family businesses in her area.

The money spent to maintain these children abroad and the time taken to ferry the children remaining in Trinidad to and from school, she said, was depleting resources which otherwise could have been ploughed back into local businesses to create more employment and investment. Asked if kidnap victims were themselves linked to criminality, Merhair said she felt offended by the suggestion, saying business people had worked hard and sacrificed much to get where they were. Lucky slammed the Government for what she called a tidal wave of crime, and the Government’s incompetence in tackling it.