When Power Forgot to Serve
- Published in Soualiga Newsday Top Stories THREE
SINT MAARTEN (COMMENTARY – By Angelique Remy-Chittick) - The public has been taught to understand GEBE through a series of separate disasters. One month, it’s a broken engine. Next, it’s an incorrect bill.
Then comes a cyberattack, another temporary manager, another board resignation and another promise that new generators are on the way. Those responsible may prefer the public to treat every failure as a new emergency, disconnected from everything that came before.
But these are not separate crises. They are chapters in the same story of institutional failure. GEBE’s crisis did not begin with the relentless load shedding of 2024, the BlackByte ransomware attack in March 2022 or Hurricane Irma in 2017.
Those events exposed the cracks in the foundation. They didn’t cause them. Long before the lights began going out, the institutions and officials entrusted with the power to serve had already stopped producing clear decisions, stable leadership and meaningful accountability.
The first warning
In 2009, GEBE announced a US$33 million expansion of the Cay Bay Power Plant. Two new Wärtsilä engines would add 22.6 megawatts, increasing the plant’s stated capacity from 72 to 94 megawatts.
At that time, GEBE explained that several smaller engines were approaching 40 years of age and could be retired. It also made something else clear: ordering, installing, and commissioning a new generator takes approximately two years. Long-term planning was part of the process of keeping the lights on.
By January 2012, these concerns had reached Parliament. On January 16, it convened a public meeting on GEBE’s electricity and water generation, distribution, and fuel clause. The technical findings were not preserved, but the meeting confirmed that the generation system was already under parliamentary scrutiny.
However, this wasn’t yet a crisis. It was a warning. GEBE continued to invest. Another 11.3-megawatt dual-fuel Wärtsilä engine was ordered in 2016 to improve the efficiency and reliability of the Cay Bay power plant.
However, one new engine did not remove the need for a properly funded replacement cycle, scheduled overhauls, and a long-term energy strategy. The island continued to grow, electricity demand continued to rise, and the older engines continued to age.
By 2016, the governance environment surrounding GEBE was under scrutiny. The General Audit Chamber found serious weaknesses in the appointment system used across government-owned companies.
It reported little or no transparency in many appointment procedures, found that politically motivated appointments were possible, and could not establish whether the legally required Corporate Governance Council advice had been obtained for 22 of the 44 appointments reviewed.
The report did not conclude that individual GEBE board members or executives were corrupt, incompetent, or responsible for what developed later. Its concern was broader: the system used to appoint and supervise public company leadership was insufficiently transparent. A new three-member Managing Board was appointed at GEBE later that year.
The Audit Chamber did not assess the individual performance or qualifications of the executives. Its findings concerned the wider system in which public company appointments were made and supervised. This distinction is important.
The issue was not whether one person could be blamed for everything that followed but whether the governance structure around GEBE was transparent, politically independent, and strong enough to protect a vital national company.
Irma didn’t create the financial problem
When Hurricane Irma devastated St. Maarten in September 2017, GEBE was not entering the disaster from a position of financial strength. In a December 2018 report, the Netherlands Court of Audit found that the company’s cash reserves had already been severely depleted before the hurricane.
In 2014, GEBE had more than XCG 67 million in reserves and by April 2018, only XCG 24 million. In 2018, the company spent approximately XCG 2 million more each month than it collected.
In a striking contradiction, GEBE made approximately XCG 10 million in concession payments for 2017 and 2018 and paid the government an XCG 8 million dividends in 2017, while approximately XCG 8.6 million in government electricity and water bills remained unpaid.
Read that again.
The shareholder, the Government of St. Maarten, received dividends and concession payments from GEBE while still owing the company millions of guilders in unpaid utility bills. That’s not a generator problem. It’s an irresponsible shareholder problem. Even as cash was being taken out of the company, GEBE was expected to recover from a Category 5 hurricane, maintain its network, invest in new generation and keep the country powered.
It could not carry that contradiction forever without consequences. The chickens would eventually come home to roost.
The money existed. Execution did not.
After Irma, €9.7 million was allocated for underground electricity cables, water storage tanks, and technical assistance for a new GEBE business plan.
The World Bank imposed conditions intended to protect public funds. Contracts had to be tendered, the government had to pay its GEBE bills on time, the proposed 2018 dividends could not be paid, and GEBE was to be relieved of certain concession payments.
The company also had to conduct risk analyses and identify external financing sources. By the end of 2018, the funds hadn’t been spent. The Netherlands Court of Audit stated that the required procurement and financial management conditions hadn’t been met, leaving some repair work at a standstill.
The same review stated that GEBE wanted to transition away from oil-fired generation to Greener, sustainable generation. The Government was identified as the main decision-maker on long-term energy planning, but financing discussions never produced a concrete proposal.
By then, the aging generators, financial strain, government arrears and need for future investment were no secret. The problems were known. What remained missing was an implemented plan.
Stability never lasted
A new Supervisory Board was appointed in 2018. By early 2022, another board and Managing Board were in place. The Government acknowledged that management instability had hurt GEBE’s functioning and employee morale. Less than two months later, hackers arrived. On March 17, 2022, GEBE discovered that the BlackByte ransomware had penetrated its systems.
The company’s customer database, financial information, and other business data were encrypted. The Police Force and Prosecutor’s Office later conducted an investigation known as “Freya.”
However, the Prosecutor’s Office described GEBE’s attitude as non-cooperative and said investigators were never given access to the compromised systems. Therefore, they could not fully establish the risks to the country and customers, identify who was behind the attack, or determine what future dangers remained.
Aurora InfoTech’s technical assessment painted an even more disturbing picture. It was found that GEBE’s Microsoft 365 environment wasn’t secured according to cybersecurity best practices. Multifactor authentication wasn’t enabled across the environment, and firewall configurations required further improvement.
The report also found that GEBE had no IT director, lacked established and documented policies, and relied heavily on ad hoc decision-making. Aurora reported limited formal reporting, system maintenance, patch management and security updating.
Some security subscriptions expired before the attack. Therefore, cyberattacks cannot be described only as unforeseeable criminal acts. The criminals caused it, but GEBE’s documented internal weaknesses affected how exposed the company was and how severe the consequences were.
There was reporting, but no public reckoning
Aurora produced a technical report, while the Police Force and Prosecutor’s Office conducted the Freya investigation. However, neither publicly available document provides a complete accounting of institutional responsibility.
The public record doesn’t explain who knew about the vulnerabilities, which warnings were escalated, which recommendations were implemented, who authorized the recovery decisions, or why investigators were denied access to the compromised systems.
Most importantly, it does not inform the public whether anyone was held accountable. The ransomware also affected information at the center of billing, collections, and account management.
GEBE had to restore operations while reconstructing its billing and revenue collection processes. Leadership changes further complicated the recovery efforts. In August 2022, the chair of the Supervisory Board and another member resigned.
The company later returned to temporary management, and by mid-2024, it was still operating under temporary 4 leadership. This was no longer one crisis. It was an operational, financial, technological, and governance crisis unfolding simultaneously.
The employees keeping the plant, grid, water system and customer services functioning should not be made scapegoats for what is clearly a governance failure. They did not create the system that failed. They were left to keep essential services running inside it.
The engines eventually collected the debt
By then, the physical system could no longer conceal the accumulated weaknesses. The Government acknowledged the continuing load shedding, while GEBE accelerated maintenance and added temporary generation capacity.
A 2025 evaluation by the Bureau Telecommunication and Post Sint Maarten and the Regulatory Authority of Curaçao found that GEBE had 85.8 megawatts of capacity on paper, but only 73.3 megawatts were operational.
Of the equivalent of 20 generator installations, roughly half were retired or out of service. Meanwhile, peak demand had risen from approximately 50 megawatts in 2014 to 60 megawatts.
Temporary generators added in 2024 increased total capacity to between 80 and 90 megawatts, but the fragility was not only mechanical. The evaluation found no effective independent tariff regulation, called for independently audited financial statements and noted that GEBE had not provided enough information to determine whether customer rates covered its actual costs.
Without current audited statements and complete cost information, neither regulators nor the public can properly assess where the money is going, whether rates are justified or how much GEBE can afford to invest.
This is what delayed decisions eventually look like: businesses buying diesel generators, families checking social media to find out when the current will return and emergency rental generators being treated as progress because permanent capacity did not arrive in time.
In January 2025, the government announced an XCG 75.6 million Dutch loan for new generators, repayable over 25 years at 2.43 per cent. At the time, the agreement governing how GEBE would acquire and repay the generators that was still being developed.
Remember what GEBE told the public in 2009: ordering, installing and commissioning a generator takes approximately two years.
So, who is responsible?
There is no honest way to place the entire GEBE crisis on one minister, one Supervisory Board, or one management team. However, this doesn’t mean that no one is responsible. ● Successive governments were responsible for shareholder oversight, strategic energy policy, supervisory appointments, government arrears, dividends, and concession payments. ● Successive supervisory boards were responsible for monitoring management, risk, investment planning, cybersecurity, and continuity. ● Successive managing boards were responsible for operations, maintenance, finance, billing systems, data security, and implementation. 5 ● Parliament was responsible for consistently holding the shareholder government accountable. Questions were asked, but without sustained follow-up, public reporting or consequences, questions alone do not amount to accountability.
The real failure is that responsibility existed at every level, but accountability disappeared between them. The Government could point to the board. The board could point to management.
Management could point to financing, procurement or the shareholder. Parliament could point to the questions it had asked. Meanwhile, the system continued to weaken. GEBE didn’t collapse suddenly.
It was allowed to deteriorate in full public display. Each warning produced another moment for political grandstanding. Each disruption produced another temporary fix. Leadership changed, reports multiplied and the underlying problems remained.
Today, the public doesn’t need another audit to know that the crisis continues. It’s visible in high, unexplained bills, yet another temporary manager and the same political gamesmanship.
While responsibility continues to be passed around like a hot potato, the people of St. Maarten are left managing both the cost of living and the strain on their peace of mind.
By Angelique Remy-Chittick Financial Strategist & Consultant Financial.ish B.V.
