Our immigration department is a rogue, lawless group of uneducated, ignorant thugs. We read the stories, see the photos of our rights being violated everyday. I was driving with my wife when we passed an immigration bus with officers loitering around. While I was waiting in traffic one of these thugs approaches my vehicle, says not a word never identifies himself but attempts to open my back door to sit in the car, thankfully the road had cleared and I quickly hit the gas and left him in the middle of the road.

The governor is so right what we need is growth in GDP to deal with our high unemployment rate and our high national debt. We have so many areas in need of drastic improvement but one is that we have far too much government red tape, it takes too long to obtain a business license, too long to open a business bank account. We also need liberalized Labour laws to make it easier to fire employees and deal with these parasitic selfish unions who discourage hiring.

Thank you for posting. Still high but half the cost of using scotia’s atm.

What are the fees? Long islanders with RBC cards can currently use the only atm in Long Island located at Scotia Bank but the fee is $9 per withdrawal. Simply ridiculous. How the central bank allows these obscene fees is beyond me.

We have two genuine options when it comes to corruption: the FNM (bad) and the PLP (terrible). I will chose bad over terrible everyday.

It is an exclusive club... and you ain’t invited.😁

You may be right and Aliv will win but most assuredly it will be a Pyrrhic victory. They have achieved market share but at what cost? Aliv is gaining more of an ever shrinking telecommunications pie. Cutthroat competition and rapid technological changes have seen to that. WhatsApp has eroded profitability as voice revenue has gone to zero. Aliv’s problem is that ARPU average revenue per unit (subscriber) is falling far below expectations and a level necessary to be profitable. It is hard to see how they get this to increase in a meaningful way. Will customers suddenly have a need to pay more for services each month? So yes they will be profitable eventually but very likely only marginally so with the bulk of profits simply servicing an onerous legacy debt. And then even if they can manage to service this debt there will inevitably be further capital raises to finance the build out of 5G and beyond. That is the peril of being in a capital intensive industry with rapid technological changes. It is clear this second cellular license is not nearly as valuable as once thought. Surprisingly most shareholders have not realized this yet.

“A significant number of the BISX-listed communications provider’s shareholders have become uncomfortable about the near-$400m debt currently sitting on its balance sheet as a result of the need to finance its mobile and US expansions.”

Cable’s debt is not near $400m, in just long term debt and preference shares it is now $442m not to mention current liabilities. This company is grossly over leveraged and it is hard to see how this debt will ever be repaid. As for Aliv it keeps coming back for more debt after promising it would not need to. This whole article seems like more spin from management and it has been going on for years.

I know a business that was slapped with a $4500 fine for being 3 days late paying business license fees. How can these people get away with this crap? Slap a huge fine for each day they are late and if they refuse invalidate their license and shut them down. I would like to know who they are paying off in campaign contributions to still be operating without paying taxes.

From what I have read in news reports and on social media one or more of these men were known, wanted prolific criminals. Our crime problem is a multifaceted one, long in the making with no easy quick fixes. This needs to be tacked systematically and intelligently with the will to see it through. There are short term and longer term measures drastically needed.

In the short term there needs to be a task force created whose sole aim is to target prolific, career violent criminals. These persons should be under 24 hr surveillance and the moment they slip up, arrested. New Providence is too small to hide, these persons are already well known to police. A most wanted list of 100 of these individuals should be on the commissioner’s desk each morning. As they are killed or incarcerated, struck off the list and another name added. You remove the 100 most hardened criminals from our streets and crime would fall drastically overnight. It is simply unacceptable for us to allow a small group of thugs to terrorize the Bahamian public and jeopardize our way of life.

Our judiciary deserves a lot of the blame as well. Handing out far too lenient sentences for very violent crimes. Our sentencing guidelines need to be much more severe and the judiciary reformed to ensure that these chronic offenders are not quickly released to commit crime again. There is so much more but these two measures would be a great start.