Today marks five weeks since we moved to alert level three. I want to commend the community for your commitment to the measures that came with it and taking the necessary precautions and personal responsibility—also much thanks to our Public Health Department. We are all in this together, and our …

Although the COVID restrictions continued to affect international travel in 2021, it was still busy at the borders of the Caribbean Netherlands. In the past year, many people traveled to or from Saba, St. Eustatius and Bonaire. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (Koninklijke Marechaussee, KMar) is responsible for border control and …

The securing of the legal right of residents of the six Dutch Caribbean islands to have a current account at a bank in the Netherlands is a step closer with the submitting of a law pro­posal to the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament. On Wednesday, Member of the Second …

Children on Saba between the age of 5 and 11 will be receiving a COVID-19 vaccination next Tuesday, February 1. The vaccines arrived from the Netherlands on Tuesday, January 25. Children will receive an age-appropriate dose of the vaccine made by Pfizer/BioNTech. The vaccine is the same as the one …

The Showroom Intensive Horticulture Pilot has completed construction and seedling trials have started. Jim Garza of Gezondheid Farms, the public-private initiative to develop agriculture at Rendez-Vous, aims to have the first round of crops harvested by end of February. “We will be providing a spring salad mix in a 1/2lb …

On International Data Protection Day, the Data Protection Authority BES (the Authority) will be focusing on the subject of data breaches. A data breach involves unauthorized/illegitimate access to personal data, such as through the accidental loss of a USB stick, a misdirected email or a criminal hack carried out on …

Online income tax returns for 2021 can already be submitted. Since last year, this has been possible via the www.MijnCN.nl platform which is more effective and guarantees the security and efficiency of the online services. Last year, a huge number of taxpayers submitted their tax returns online. We hope that …

The World Customs Organization (WCO) has declared the 26th of January as ‘International Customs Day’ and this day is celebrated worldwide. This year, the WCO has selected the following theme for the year 2022: “Scaling up Customs Digital transformation by embracing a data culture and building a data ecosystem” In the …

On January 17th, 2022, Mark Zagers, Managing Director of the Saba Electric Company (SEC), officially handed over the keys to Peter Johnson, President of the Saba Conservation Foundation (SCF), the new tenant of the old power plant at the Fort Bay harbor. Also present were commissioner, Bruce Zagers, other SCF …

The Financial Services Complaints Institute (Kifid) in The Netherlands has rejected a complaint by a resident of Bonaire about the ‘foreign surcharge’ that ABN AMRO charges residents of the Caribbean Netherlands. The bank is allowed to do this because European legislation is not in force on Bonaire, St. Eustatius and …