While members of the Police Staff Association make ready for elections on Thursday, executives say the more than $80,000 Bahamas Supermarkets Limited (BSL) still owes several of their officers is top on their agenda.
The writ claims that the supermarket chain, with three stores in Grand Bahama and five in New Providence, owes officers of the Royal Bahamas Police Force $81,321.50 for security services rendered in 2011 during its hours of operation.
BSL had 14 days to respond.
President Dwight Smith, in an interview with The Freeport News while in Grand Bahama, said since the writ was filed in the Supreme Court two weeks ago and they have heard nothing from the City Market owners.
“So we’re just waiting,” he said.
The law firm LaRoda, Francis & Co. is representing the association.
However, Smith said the association had hoped the matter did not have to go to court and that they could have met with the BSL owners and worked out how the debt could be settled.
He pointed out that $81,000 was no drop in the bucket and the off-duty officers had anticipated receiving the funds at least for the holidays.
“That’s a good amount of money,” he said. “It was over a period of time, it was for officers and they were looking forward to it because they made the effort to go to these places to work so that they can have this to help them with either gifts or whatever they wanted to do for their families at Christmastime.
“But, of course, Christmas and New Year’s (Day) is gone and yet still we had not settled the matter with City Market.”
Smith noted that some of the stores were open on a 24-hour basis.
“So you had police officers there for 24-hours,” he said.
While Smith could not give a number as to how many officers are affected, he said one can do the math as there was an officer for each shift at every store.
Smith explained that a private engagement is given to officers who are off duty.
“So they sacrifice some things. They sacrifice their rest time (and), they sacrifice time with their families to work these private engagements to be paid at the end of the day,” he said.
He confirmed that the association was not informed about the closures and learned the same time as the general public.
In fact, since then, Smith said the association has had a number of former City Markets employees requesting their assistance.
“However, we cannot represent them but they also had concerns and wanted someone to air their issues too. We pointed them in the right direction for that,” he said.
“In the meantime, we’ve made the effort to sit down with management to see what we can do in terms of working it out,” said Smith. Efforts to reach a BSL representative yesterday proved unsuccessful.
Source: The Freeport News
