TONNES OF POT FOUND IN T-SHIRT SHIPMENT

How a shipment of T-shirts made by a Montreal company came to be
accompanied by tonnes of marijuana has police investigators in several
Caribbean countries scratching their heads.

The police are baffled by how the Miami-bound shipment, which originated at
the Barbados factory of Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc., took on the
extra cargo.

The marijuana - 10 to 30 tonnes, according to police - was discovered when
the shipment was stopped in Jamaica in February.

The incident has left company officials shaken. They have decided to close
the assembly facility in Barbados and lay off 50 employees.

'Unjust, Unfair'

David Simmons, acting prime minister of Barbados, told local newspapers the
shutdown of the factory in Warrens, St. Michael, was "utterly unjust and
unfair" and warned against scapegoating the employees.

The Barbadian government was advised of the incident only on March 6,
Simmons said, 26 days after the discovery.

What happened exactly and who is to blame are in dispute, but company
officials and Barbados police agree on this much:

- - The company packed a container of T-shirts at the factory and sent it to
the port of Bridgetown, the country's capital, on Feb. 1.

- - The container sat overnight on the dock in a well-lit area and in plain
sight of security.

- - The following day, it was loaded on to the ship Seaboard Toronto for a
trip to Miami via Trinidad, Venezuela and Jamaica.

- - The container seal was apparently unbroken.

Graham Sutherland, vice-president (finance) for Gildan Activewear SRL, the
company's Barbados subsidiary, said police in Barbados are satisfied - for
now - that the drugs were not inserted in Barbados but rather in Jamaica.

"This is the fifth or sixth container we've shipped from that facility over
the last several months, and this is the first time this has happened to
us," Sutherland said.

"So between Point A (Bridgetown) and Point B (Miami), the container was
seized and found to have some drugs on it."

Laurence Sellyn, Gildan's chief financial officer, said it was between 10
and 30 tonnes of marijuana but could not estimate its street value.

"Police and government officials have suggested that they're quite
confident it did not happen in the port," he said.

Sellyn, who called the incident "a small local thing blown up," said the
company was advised "on or about" Feb. 16 that Jamaican police had found
the illegal drugs in two containers, one from Gildan and another from a
second Barbadian firm that he could not identify.

Port-authority officials did not return calls.

Sutherland and Sellyn said the firm conducted its own probe, but Sellyn
could not specify how. "I imagine the 50 employees were interviewed," he said.

Gildan has other plants in Honduras and Mexico. But Sutherland said that
after meeting with the port authority, police and government officials in
Barbados, they moved to shut the Warrens plant.

"We decided that after sealing and dropping off a container, we felt we
were not in a position to ensure its secure passage right to Miami and all
points in between," Sutherland said.

The Honduras and Mexico plants are much bigger and warrant a large security
operation, said Sutherland. But the Barbados plant made only 100,000 dozen
T-shirts a year - out of a company total of 18.5 million dozen annually -
and its size did not justify spending a lot of resources on surveillance.

"To my knowledge, this never happened at one of our other plants,"
Sutherland said.

Workers will receive "comfortably in excess of the legal minimum" in
severance pay, Sutherland said.

He added that "a fraction" of the drugs was found in the Gildan container
and that the bulk was in the other one, but he could not be more specific.

The plant's shutdown will not entail a writeoff because the space will
eventually be used to house Gildan's expanding sales force, Sutherland said.

That international sales unit employs about 40 people.

The sewing plant, where workers stitched together all the T-shirt parts,
opened last summer and was an investment of about $1.5 million, Sellyn said.

Sgt. Caroline Blackman-Alleyne, in charge of the Interpol office for the
Barbadian police, said from Bridgetown that she is waiting for information
from Jamaican police before commenting.