So, as you heard, the stevedores and their union don't believe one bit that this injunction application was initiated as a check and balance of the government's public spending procedures.
They tell us that, as a matter of fact, they suspected that the Port would try to make some sort of chess move to frustrate the disbursement process. Here's how the CWU President explained that they quickly moved to ensure that there would be no logistical bottleneck on their end when it came time for them to receive that 1.5 mil from Government:
Evan "Mose" Hyde - President, CWU
"Internally, once that claim was filed against us in court, meaning the union, the five negotiating team members, and myself, we said, ˜Listen, we know PBL.' We immediately expedited all our own internal processes and started to reach out to the government people to have them know, Yeah, this is what we are doing.' And in fact, we had all members who were actually in the bank the morning finalizing papers. And so, we have to ask for time off for members to go to the bank to sign up the documents to us to create the account through which the funds would be channeled. So, we know. Our experience has been that we have not been successful in keeping secrets from PBL. So, I would not be surprised, though I don't have any proof, that they were aware that we were. I can tell you. Since last week, we have been doing everything in our power to work the process to get this done because we kind of had a sixth sense about this."
