Clarke THE GOVERNMENT is to wind up, from today, the operations of Sugar Industry Housing Ltd., with headquarters at 16 Oxford Terrace, Kingston 5, with 36 staffers set to lose their jobs within the next three months.
According to Roger Clarke, Agriculture Minister, while the company was able to generate enough income from its operations to allow it to be relatively self-sufficient for most of the last 25 years, circumstances have changed and it can no longer operate viably.
Garry Turnbull, the company's general manager, blames the current sluggishness of the economy for the closure decision. He said SIH used to generate income from offering project management services to several private and public sector housing developments. He said Sugar Industry Housing was having great difficulty in collecting on-time, fees from its clients, thereby creating severe cash-flow problems.
Sugar Industry Housing Ltd. was established in 1975 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Sugar Industry Authority, with a mandate to provide housing for sugar workers. It was initially financed from a cash pool provided from the Price Stabilisation Fund. The fund had in turn been set up after the 1974-75 sugar season, from the profits earned by the industry on the international market in that financial year.
Mr. Turnbull told The Gleaner that 36 employees would be affected by the company's closure, 15 initially, and the rest over the next two to three months.
On the other hand, he said, the current beneficiaries of the housing programme would not be adversely affected, as the National Housing Trust (NHT) had taken over responsibility for the 5,000 housing units involved, and the workers in question would simply start making their mortgage payments to the NHT instead of to Sugar Industry Housing Ltd.
