Gov’t awards stimulus cheques to 67% of applicants so far
A total of 1,258 businesses have now benefited from the government’s COVID-19 Small-Business Sector Grant Relief Programme.
This number represents approximately 67 per cent of the total 1,883 businesses that applied for economic relief.
This leaves 625 local businesses that have not received any government assistance.
Responding to questions in the House of Assembly on Wednesday, Premier Andrew Fahie said those remaining businesses did not receive any official notification that they were denied.
“They must get a response one way or the other but remember the COVID-19 grant programme is still ongoing,” stated Fahie, who also said some of those remaining businesses belong to persons who had multiple businesses.
He said: “The other area we have to recognise is that some persons would have put in for multiple Trade Licenses and some decisions had to be made [to say], ‘well, alright. If they had seven trade licenses, we know it may be seven different businesses. But we cannot allow one person to go with seven cheques’. So there was also a decision to try and space it out to make sure that at least as many persons across the diaspora of the BVI got some kind of stimulus cheques.”
Opposition Leader Marlon Penn said he agrees with the decision not to give a business owner with several trade licences cheques for each business.
He, however, urged the Premier to ensure applicants with different circumstances are not overlooked.
“If there are persons there who haven’t gotten any cheques at all, we [should] find a way to get some support to those businesses because we all know the challenges that businesses are facing currently in this current climate,” he stated.
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The money is been used by the government to do other things while the people suffer, That’s BVI love for you.
I have a certificate of good standing and and I was denied by social security help.
@layef off – even though maybe it’s your karma? You’ll blame everything else except you’ll karma
Will there ever be a proper accounting for where the money went and who got it?
Of course not.
Only 2 thirds of applications got paid from 40 million. Wow. Even if they used just half of it, 20 mil for stimulus, 2 thousand people could have gotten 10 thousand each, and we all know that 10 thousand people didn’t receive stimulus and the most one employee got is around 4 thousand, only a few chosen employees got that much, and only a few chosen businesss received in excess of 10 thousand dollars. Where is the rest. And when are the other 3rd going to get? The best way out or to redeem themselves is go give another stimulus in May. They have the monies for it..
Business stimulus was 6 or 12 million. Certainly not the numbers you threw out. Agriculture & fisheries was 2.5 million.
Check the churches. They use the stimulus money to get the support of the church pastors to convince their congregation to vote for them. This government is playing a dangerous spiritual game and the churches have all sucked in to it. Some churches got up to 40k and businesses only got 4k-6K. Some churches did not ask for the money but it was sent to them by the Great Architect of the Universe.
So what about the people who applied and are qualified to received because all their dues are up to date and they did not get one cent yet.
So the big businesses in the tourism industry that cannot operate because of the previous borders closure and now port closure are not eligible to get this help, why? and they are the ones that are directly affected in the BVI by this pandemic.