Many customers of banks have been complaining on social media about not being treated fairly and with dignity by their banks during this pandemic.

“Going on three, four weeks now, you can’t have access to these banks. You gotta call Banco [Popular] to make an appointment to see somebody. And then the people are complaining, you call, nobody would answer the phone or the phone don’t even ring,” he stated on his Honestly Speaking Radio Programme on 780 ZBVI AM on Tuesday, August 10, 2021.

“To go to Banco, you got cars on the drive-thru lined up around the admin complex, around Maria’s coming around. I see some people posting on Facebook, “90 minutes now, and I am still in the drive-thru line, how much longer does it take?” Why are you all doing this to the people?”

Government consultant Mr Claude O. Skelton-Cline has called on the Andrew A. Fahie-led administration to intervene in the alleged bad treatment that the various banking institutions are meting out to the public.

Government needs to step in!

Mr Skelton-Cline said the government must step in and “say to the powers that be, in Puerto Rico and St Thomas and Trinidad and wherever these headquarters are and tell these people you will not tolerate how your people are being treated in these Virgin Islands.”

“Yes, we must be safe, yes we must be sane, but we must find a better way to conduct business than how we have been doing these last few weeks.”

Decisions can’t be from locals

Mr Skelton Cline said he is confident that these decisions are not being made by the locals employed at these banks.

“Nobody can convince me that these are local decisions because I know the local people in Republic Bank, in First Bank, First Caribbean Bank, Banco, and I know some of the people, and I know that this cannot be their decisions. We gotta do better than this! We are not treating our people in this country right!”

He also called on the locals to “push back against wherever these decisions are coming from and stop treating us here in these Virgin Islands like we are some kind of scorned dogs!”