Marriott owners lodge protest against Kaieteur, Stabroek News … provide evidence discrediting erroneous claims by Chris Ram

By Gary Eleazar, April 4, 2015, Source

ATLANTIC Hotel Inc (AHI)—the owners of the Marriott Hotel in Kingston, Georgetown—have lodged a formal complaint with the Media Monitoring Unit (MMU), over recent reportage by the privately owned Kaieteur News and Stabroek News, and provided evidence discrediting what it calls erroneous reports.

The two privately owned newspapers recently regurgitated assertions by blogger Christopher Ram, who claimed on his chrisram.net outlet that the ‘Construction Contract’ for the US$58M Marriott Hotel, with Shanghai Construction Group (SCG), was in fact inked before a Feasibility Study was completed.

ERRONEOUS PUBLICATIONS
AHI, the owners of the Marriott Hotel, in a public missive, have since put its complaint to the MMU—an arm of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM)—into context, noting that following the erroneous publications, clarifications were offered but these were never published by the offending newspapers.

Counsel Christopher Ram

Ram, in his writings, relied on a Feasibility Study dated 2012 and conducted by HVS Consulting and Valuation.

He juxtaposed this with the date for which the Construction Contract was inked with SCG in November of 2011, the previous year.

According to AHI, what Ram, Kaieteur News and Stabroek News failed to acknowledge is the fact that since 2012, all Members of Parliament were provided with the knowledge that the Marriott Group, along with an Independent American Firm, had already completed two Feasibility Studies for the Hotel Project since 2010.

AHI said the 2012 document referred to by Ram is in fact an updated 2010 report, done by the American Firm, HVS Consulting and Valuation.

This information was provided to all Parliamentarians in February 2012 and recently resupplied to the media following the erroneous publications, none of which were retracted or corrections issued.

EVIDENCE
AHI has since made public extracts of the Feasibility Studies conducted by the Marriott International Inc. and HVS Consulting and Valuation in 2010, inherently discrediting the offending articles.

One extract made public was pulled from the report’s Market Study and Feasibility Analysis Chapter for the Proposed Marriott Hotel and Entertainment Complex.

The extract states: “The date of the report is October4, 2010. The subject site was inspected by John P. lancet on September 14, 2010.”

AHI also disclosed that in the 2010 Feasibility Report conducted by HVS Consulting and Valuation Services, it was envisaged: “The proposed hotel will be managed by Marriott Worldwide Corporation (MWC). Terms of this agreement call for a base management fee of 0.25% of total (gross) revenues.”

Providing further evidence of the 2010 studies for the Marriott Hotel, AHI also supplied an extract of the ‘Executive Summary Market Study and Estimates of Future Operating Performance dated January 2010 and prepared by: “Marriott International Inc. Development Planning and Feasibility.”

At the time, according to the documents supplied by AHI, the hotel was envisioned to be a 160-room edifice.

AHI, in further discrediting the assertions by Ram and reprinted by both the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News, also supplied an extract of the ‘Estimates of Future Operating Performance’ dated February 2011, this time for a 197-room facility, also prepared by Marriott International Inc.

UNFORTUNATE MEDIA
In the strongly worded missive, AHI has since reminded that under the ‘Declaration of Chapultec’, of which the Guyana Government is a signatory: “The credibility of the press is linked with commitment to truth, to the pursuit of accuracy, fairness and objectivity …the obtainment of these goals and the respect for ethical and professional values may not be imposed. These are the exclusive responsibility of journalists and the media.”

According to AHI, “It is unfortunate that our media consistently fail to accept that responsibility.”

Winston Brassington, AHI’s Chairman, as a result of the infractions and failure on the part of the named media houses to correct the erroneous reportage, states: “We shall be writing to the Media Monitoring Unit (MMU) of GECOM and to the Guyana Press Association, pointing out the unprofessional and completely unacceptable behaviour of our media in publishing Mr. Ram’s false allegations without any attempt to verify their accuracy and then refusing to publish our response to these allegations which they publish.”

Brassington stated too, “It has now become the habit of Mr. Ram to publish in his blog, inaccurate, tasteless and, often, defamatory statements with regard to myself, NICIL and the Marriott Hotel, without any reference to the facts or the truth.”

“It is unfortunate that some media houses believe that they have a license to indiscriminately republish Mr. Ram’s utterances without any regard for the obvious inaccuracies,” he opined.

‘The credibility of the press is linked with commitment to truth, to the pursuit of accuracy, fairness and objectivity …the obtainment of these goals and the respect for ethical and professional values may not be imposed. These are the exclusive responsibility of journalists and the media’

By Gary Eleazar