This makes perfect sense. The restrictions on who may practice Bahamian law could stay firmly in place, so Bahamian legal jobs would not be threatened. If foreign law firms that opened offices in The Bahamas wanted to advise clients on matters of Bahamian law then they would need to include Bahamian lawyers amongst their fee-earners. In many markets across the world, foreign law firms actually practice only foreign law (e.g. English law or New York law .... or even other kinds of law such as the civil code of mainland European countries) so they would be supplementing not competing with the local Bahamian legal profession. Allowing international investors to be advised in-country by the international law firms that advise them internationally has been shown in other markets to encourage foreign direct investment, trade and economic growth generally. We live in a globally integrated world and capital moves to where risks are lowest, given reasonable returns. Markets that do the most to make themselves attractive to investors, are the most likely to attract that capital. This would be a good thing.

The revenue that Grand Bahama's port area could generate for the Bahamas were it to be properly configured and operated as a free zone would not be roughly equivalent to the $400 million expected to be generated from VAT .... but several multiples of it. In other words, it could also fund a broad range of nation building / social upliftment projects across the country.

Bravo!

The most important observation here is that Freeport is completely dysfunctional as a free zone. How can it be that it only generates $150 million p.a. in revenues to the national Treasury? A properly configured, well managed Special Economic Zone (SEZ) such as Freeport could and should be would be generating many multiples of that for the wider Bahamian nation. Freeport should be a source of great national pride to Bahamians; not a source of dissent and controversy.

The concept of 'free zones' / SEZs such as Freeport is neither new nor unusual. The International Labour Organization (a specialist UN agency) tracks >3,500 of them across the world - some dating back to even before the Hawksbill Creek Agreement was signed in 1955. Countries as diverse as China, Mauritius, Bangladesh, Panama, Dominica, Honduras and the United States of America, amongst many others, have used them successfully as tools to drive inward investment, economic growth and job creation. Why not Freeport?

Many reasons can be listed. At their root lies that over the recent decades, Freeport has evolved into a fiefdom of disparate interests, most of whom could survive quite happily in the limited economy driven by minor tourism and the harbour. As a now-deceased senior GBPA executive is reported to have said, they like it just the way it is (or perhaps the way that it was prior to 2009 and before that hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.) Combined with that, immigration and other government policies (both red and gold) have made it well-nigh impossible to emulate the more successful free zones elsewhere in the world, anyway. An environment has evolved in Freeport that repels rather than attracts most international investment; that does not create anything more than relatively few and mostly unskilled or semi-skilled jobs; that has led to a stagnating local economy. In order for Freeport to be successful, going forward, all this needs to change.

In the new world that has emerged since the 2009 crash, that need for that change has become desperate. Fixing Freeport is no longer just about delivering modest revenues to government and creating a couple of thousand new low-paying jobs. It should be recognized for what it is, namely the single most promising opportunity that the country has to reverse the current trajectory on which it finds itself, of spiraling national debt and deepening economic stagnation.

To an outsider, it seems that the only really compelling obstacle to this, is the will to make it so.

@ Jackflash. Thank you sincerely for the acknowledgement, for which I am truly grateful …. but the work was very much a team effort. What I did was to design and facilitate a strategic planning process that combined widespread grassroots consultation with detailed desktop and field research with some quite complex and intense financial and economic modeling. Credit for the recommendations must be heavily shared with Barry Malcolm and many other Bahamians who contributed very substantively to executing that process …. some openly; others unfortunately only upon condition that their contributions remained anonymous. (These were difficult times. Litigation between the GBPA owners was in full swing. Hutchison Whampoa sought to buy the same assets. The Prime Minister was not favourably disposed towards our client. So, it was difficult for some to be open about their views on the future of Freeport.)

Of all the wonderful memories that I have of the work we did, some of the most humbling and meaningful are those of grassroots meetings in church halls and other community venues with quiet, serious-faced everyday Bahamians whose greatest concerns were about getting food onto their tables and raising their children with the right values and giving them a better chance in life. These discussions left the whole project team determined that the Freeport that we sought to design for our client was specifically focused on their needs, too. To his/their credit, our client had very clearly told us, repeatedly, that what they wanted to achieve had to significantly benefit the lives of everyday Bahamians too, so we were able to build that overtly into the plan.

None of this would have been possible without Barry. He had to withdraw professionally from the project when he became CEO of ScotiaBank Bahamas, in order to protect his new employer’s interests and because of his fiduciary duty to focus exclusively on that role. His wisdom and insight remained an essential ingredient in the work, though. So too that of Sarah Kirkby, Janet Albury, Dr Olivia Saunders and Michael Rolle, amongst others. Also that of NERA, PwC and others who contributed key economic and financial perspectives. Regarding Barry Malcolm personally, I should add that in my opinion, he has as deep an understanding of Bahamian politics and economics, coupled with as deep a love of the Bahamas and his fellow-Bahamians, as anybody that I have ever met.

Yes, it is a pity that the global financial crisis of 2009 coupled with the level of resistance to his efforts that he encountered put paid to our client’s initiative. That does not mean that the opportunity to progress what was started then is also gone, though. In the words of John F Kennedy: *“Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”*