Wayne Chen gets back visa

Monday, August 16, 2010

THE US visa of prominent businessman Wayne Chen was reinstated last week, six months after it was revoked by the Americans in a move that many Jamaicans feared underlined a widening of the diplomatic fissure that had been developing between Jamaica and its most important trading and political partner.

Yesterday, Chen, the chairman of the state-owned Urban Development Corporation (UDC) confirmed in an interview with the Observer, that he had been reissued a US visa. While he could offer no explanation for the initial cancellation, or for that matter, the decision to restore his entry rights into America, he was effusive in his praise for the staff of the US Embassy in Kingston, which he said “had been very polite in all their interactions with me” throughout the saga.

“To this day I have no specific reason as to why it was revoked or why it was reinstated, but I want to say thanks to the US embassy in Jamaica,” said Chen.

Chen, the architect of the consolidation and rapid growth of the once-fragmented SuperPlus family business into Jamaica’s largest retailer until it began to buckle a few years ago, is the only one of the Chen brothers, which includes NCB’s billionaire owner Michael Lee Chin, who is not a citizen of North America.

For over 30 years, he held an American visa, travelling at will for business and personal purposes to that country, until the dramatic turn of events at the end of February, when, attempting to board an American Airlines flight for a business trip to the USA, he was informed by an agent of the airline that he was barred from travelling to that country.

“My bags were already checked in, my family was on the plane,” Chen told the Observer yesterday, in recounting the events which, by that February afternoon, would hit the national news cycle like a firestorm, and later become entangled in the political and diplomatic drama that had been playing out between USA and Jamaica, over this country’s handling of an extradition request for Tivoli Gardens strongman, Christopher ’Dudus’ Coke, by American justice authorities.

Coke is now in the USA awaiting trial on allegations of drugs and guns violations in that jurisdiction.

In his interview with this newspaper, Chen explained that it was only in February, when he was barred from travelling, that he learned that his visa had actually been cancelled a month earlier — from the end of January — and that he immediately contacted the embassy in Kingston to seek an explanation and its advice. He said he was advised by an official “to apply right away” to seek a restoration of his travel privilege.

“They made an appointment right over the phone for me to come in the Monday morning, just with my passport and fill out a form.”

Chen declined to say what, if any role Audrey Marks, Jamaica’s ambassador to the USA had played in having his visa restored, arguing that any such information would be confidential. Marks, an entrepreneur and the former president of the American Chamber of Commerce of Jamaica, is said to be well-connected within Washington, and is credited with hitting the ground running in the heart of America’s political power, since her appointment in May.

In a twist of irony, Chen has found in the entire experience, a revalidation of his faith in America.

“It reinforces my faith in America as a self critical democracy,” he declares. “In many ways, America is a positive role model for a developing country like Jamaica.”

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