PHILIPSBURG:--- Sunshine Real Estate managed to secure a contract with the Dutch Government to provide solar energy on the island of St. Eustatius.
SMN News obtained information from one of the people that are acquainted with the company who said that on Thursday last week the Dutch Government signed the contract with Sunshine Real Estate after they won the bid on that island. The project which is very comprehensive will cost the Dutch government close to 5 million Euros for 2 MW of solar energy some of which will be stored in batteries so that the island could run solely on solar power. The first part of the project is to provide solar energy to parts of St. Eusttius but the objective of the Dutch is to get to the point where Sunshine Real Estate will provide solar enegry to the entire island.
According to the information SMN News obtained is that the process took just over eight months before the contract was signed on Thursday which include the bidding process.
Sunshine Real Estate also won the bid to provide solar energy for GEBE St. Maarten but to date no contract can be signed even though the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Rene Gartner signed a letter of intent (LOI) with the company.
SMN News further learnt that Sunshine Real Estate did everything they were asked to do after they won the bidding process and even provided all documents to GEBE but somehow the former COO Romelio Maduro and the current CFO Rene Gartner messed up the process. "The former COO Romelio Maduro refused to take the LOI to the Supervisory Board as he was basically fooling around with the project and the investors, that forced Gartner to sign the LOI and then Maduro took it to the board when he wanted to get rid of Gartner. This LOI and the car Gartner purchased without the approval of the Shareholder representative were subjects the Supervisory Board of Directors questioned. Because of these two disagreements Gartner and Maduro almost ended up in a fist fight during one of their meetings with the supervisory board of directors of GEBE."
SMN News published the LOI that Rene Gartner signed before presenting it to GEBE Supervisory Board for approval. Inside sources at GEBE said that the supervisory board of directors sent an eight page memo to Gartner posing several questions to him on the LOI with Sunshine Real Estate but to date Gartner did not respond to the supervisory board thus the process of awarding the contract to Sunshine Real Estate halted.
In earlier reports SMN News reported that GEBE internal controller was busy formulating a report for the supervisory board on how bidding takes place at GEBE, however, SMN News could not confirm if the report on the bidding process at GEBE has been completed and submitted.
It should also be noted that the shareholder representative of GEBE announced earlier this year that they will be conducting a forensic audit at all the government owned companies on the island