SP, I sent you a message on your profile as to how to reach Dr. Minnis on his private email account. I immediately regretted sending it to you without asking him, but I thought that your heartfelt suggestions were DAMN good. If that message did not make it through with his email address, then I would check your profile page. If it is still not there, it would make me feel better. Anyway, I will cut and paste your post and send it on, for what its worth. The FNM crew is incredibly busy now and has limited bandwidth.

My impressions thus far is that the PLP left a real shitcake of mismanagement, pilfering and criminality and we are in a very very deep hole. The PLP partisans and rectums posting here, haven't a clue as to how bad the situation really is, and to what extent the PLP are complete treasonous slimebuckets, and fixing this will be like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. I still believe in humanity in spite of the pieces of work like Tal and Birdie, so there is still hope. But with entropy being the way it is, the picture is very grim.

Hilarious. Crisco Butt gave away the country to the Chinese and you are worried about some government agency that impoverish the people? When did you suffer your stroke?

I may have told this story in public before, and if I have, please excuse me. I had a client who used to visit Freeport in 1980's. He fell in love with it. He wasn't an Ultra High Net Worth Individual, but he was fairly loaded -- a millionaire many many times over. He wasn't using us as a tax haven either. He was paying taxes in Canada & wanted to escape the winter & move to Freeport. Furthermore, he wanted a relocation, because a move to Freeport and a transfer of his domicile & business would automatically reduce his income tax, as Canadians are taxed on residence & not citizenship. If you live full time in an income tax free country, you don't pay Canadian income tax.

At the time, the development arm of the Port Authority (Devco, I think) was building canal-side houses. He inquired about about purchasing one & was met with an eager-beaver sales person. The sales person handed him a card that was half the size of a sheet of paper. It had room for name, address, telephone no, business number, etc, and it had six questions on it.

The six questions all had to do with establishing net worth -- yearly income, investments, investment income, business income and the sixth question was "do you have assets totaling .... I think it was 1 million dollars." The threshold was very low. Get this ... the final step was that when the card with the answers was taken to the back room, the "manager" came out of the office momentarily to take a quick peek at the person. My client was convinced that it was the last test, and it was a skin pigmentation test. Anything over a light shade of mocha was unacceptable.

So, my client passes the test, and the salesman starts showing him the particulars of the dwelling. My client, who in an earlier life owned a construction company asked the price. When it was quoted, he did a quick calculation using a cost per square foot metric. He had a quick thumbnail sketch of how much per square foot it cost to build a luxury home, and this seemed to be 3 times what he thought it should cost -- particularly since there wasn't granite counter tops and the materials and workmanship that he was used to.

The manager came out, and said that he was authorised to reduce the price of the house by $210,000 and that pending verification of his financial data, all that he had to do, was put a down payment of $100,000 and they would finance his mortgage at an attractive rate. But, the application fee to set this all in motion was something ridiculous -- can't remember whether he said $2,000 or $5,000, but it was exorbitant just for applying.

My client was not pleased at all at the ethics of these people, and instead, bought a condo at the Taino Beach complex. Along came hurricanes Jeanne and Frances, and his condo building was destroyed. The insurance paid fair market value, and his investment was repaid handsomely.

But the moral of this story, is that not only Bahamians have issues with the Port Authority.

I sent you a private message to your profile on Dr. Minnis' personal email account.

I am still in mourning over Chester joining the PLP. I thought highly of him, and I thought that he was smart.

Picewell is just a slobbering gorilla in this pic. I am blown away that he got elected. He must have spent a pretty penny buying this elec..... oh never mind.

Air Canada is a publicly traded company. The majority shareholder is a proxy called LBA or Letko Brosseau Associates who are a capital management fund. As the largest shareholder, they nominatively own 17.2% of the company or 47 million of the 270 million shares out there. The next largest shareholder group consists of Fidelity and Tetrem - more capital partners groups who both own less than 4% each. Then the major banks have shareholders amounting to less than 1% of the shares. That is the entire list of major shareholders. The rest of the shares are owned by investors with not any single investor owning more than half a percent of the total equity. So the shares are distributed widely. The Canadian government privatised Air Canada in 1988 and currently does not hold any shares.

The capital management partners of LBA who own most of Air Canada in proxy, are thought to have invested money in Air Canada through LBA on behalf of wealthy Hong Kong clients.

Co-sign. BahamasAir should be shut down.

I agree about taking back the private ownership. But what I don't agree with, is giving it to the Nassau government. It should be an economic zone that is a city state unto itself that is totally free.

Like this:

http://www.caymanenterprisecity.com/

cancel ... i just read your second post.

> Completely open Free Port to American companies and persons. No work permit required. Done.

This one is so easy and could be so lucrative. And what we could do, is open up residency restriction to digital nomads -- self employed tech guys who work remotely and live anywhere. They still like the old fashioned sun, sand, sea and beer that other tourists find outdated, especially when it is part of their work environment.