Cable Bahamas is so leveraged out,that I would rate these as junk investments. There is no rating agency in the Bahamas for BISX shares, so one has to be careful. Julian Brown's company shares were trading on BISX right until it was liquidated. There is no strict oversight on financial viability of investments. BISX is a joke, and will sell anything to anybody to look significant. It is for unsophisticated suckers only.

I want some of what you are smoking. James Smith, with his public pronouncements has been on the wrong side of everything that he has every spoken about. And he was the junior minister of state for Finance in the previous Christie regime, that wrought wrack and ruin on the economics of this country. His favourite word is "structural", and he doesn't understand what that means, otherwise he would repair the structure of the monolithic, moribund, restrictive economy. Exchange controls hold Bahamians down, by denying them the ability to invest abroad and have access to foreign capital to drive their businesses. He and the PLP is the worst of the worst things that could have happened to the Bahamas upon independence.

If you want to know what the Cayman Islands did, is go to www.caymanenterprisecity.com You will be astounded. They created businesses out of thin air with talented individuals and companies. Here is the package in a nutshell:

1) When you apply to join the special economic zone known as Cayman Enterprise City, they are mandated by law to reply in 10 days.

2) Applicants once approved are given a free pass for residency and work permits -- for free!

3) A free business licence.

4) Moving to the Caymans allows you to bring all of your stuff, household, work, car, etc without duty and import tax.

5) Free work permits for employees.

6) Office space, telephone, fax and receptionist

All of this costs the businessman about $1,000 a month. That is it. In Freeport, the application alone costs $1,000, the business licence is priced out of this world compared to Cayman and they keep gouging you by nickel and diming you to death.

The Cayman folks realise that you don't make the money by bleeding the businesses dry. You set them up with minimal obstructions, you let them operate unfettered, and they create massive amounts of economic offset, including jobs, spending, housing, contributing to the local GDP or economy, and giving the country a positive trade surplus.

There is a special section of the Cayman Enterprise City for jobs for Caymani residents only. These are jobs created by foreigners. Except they aren't jobs. They are careers. High paying, knowledge industry jobs. Look for yourself. They are high paying jobs (the Cayman dollar trades about $1.20, so a $36,000 a year job is about $45,000 or about $850 a week).

The Port has wasted its opportunity, by its sheer, bloody, pigheadedness and gouging. All businesses applying are seen as fresh meat to be bled dry and then slaughtered. If they just got a lick of common sense, and threw the place wide open with minimum impediments and a great ease of doing business, Freeport could be the place to be.

Will it happen? I doubt it. They have their heads so far up their rectal cavities, that their severe tunnel vision won't let them see past the instant gratification of collecting fees at every turn.

Julian Brown, Warren Davis, Owen Bethel, Kelvin Leach, Rohn Knowles,

Our "financial services" are the laughingstock of the world. It's no wonder that there is a flight of capital of HNWI (High Net Worth Individuals) from the Bahamas.

Hope the health insurance is better than the BAMSI fire insurance.

Sigh, there are so many things wrong here, that one doesn't know where to begin. Let's start with Freeport, and Grand Bahama itself. The Hawksbill Treaty and Grand Bahama Port Authority is such a lost opportunity that it is beyond comprehension to anyone examining the situation with an un-jaundiced eye.

When Freeport was first built, it had better infrastructure than Nassau. The roads were wide, paved, with manicured verges, carriageways and stop lights. It was a model city. It never lived up to its promise because the owners were more like Mafia skimming off from the gross, grafting off the revenue stream of licence holders. They were like the bookies collecting the vigorish from overall pot of money. What they should have been doing, is investing in business infrastructure, lowering the cost of energy, and facilitating the ease of doing business.

Instead, they turned into a collection agency at every turn, while offering nothing back. At one point in its heyday, the International Bazaar was bustling with commerce. The various cultural sections had sales clerks dressed in period costumes, and the place was full of tourists and the glitterati. The casino and hotel was a world class complex.

They never understood that they should have been in the business of helping business rather than bleeding it dry like racketeers. They were like boys building a clubhouse, thinking it was exclusive, and charging all of the kids lunch money for entrance to the club.

They never understood the principle of economic offset, and of the immense but varied profits of having bustling, unfettered businesses generated a whole variety of different revenue streams other than licence fees and rents. The owning families are directly responsible for the rot in Grand Bahama. They are the morons of merchantry, the graspers of greed, the idiots of industry and the short-sighted simpletons of selling. They blew it.

And then you have the reliance on Foreign Direct Investment, which means only construction and low level jobs for Bahamians, while all of the power and management jobs go to the foreigners. But that is all that we are good for -- poor manual labor that is vital to soaking up illiterate and semi-literate workers.

Christie and his band of corrupt, kleptomaniac cohorts believe that if you build it, the tourists will come. They do not understand the nature of how tourism has changed from sun, sand, sea and casino to the experiential tourism.

Almost every commenter on this site understands the above, except for the PLP fanatic partisans who have embedded a politician's rectum in their cranial cavities and have traded their brains for a tee shirt and a turkey, and yet the politicians do not have the slightest clue about the underlying economics of what is happening in the country. God help us all.

You said the magic words "Tax Avoidance". That is legal. What the Bahamas specialises in, is "Tax Evasion". That is illegal. That was the lucrative pie, and now it is not.

I agree with the sentiment that tax avoidance professionals are now onshore.

You mention that the IMF, World Bank, WTO are working with their masters. I might point out (albeit redundantly) that these are not independent agencies, but ARE operating arms of the highly developed countries (G8, etc).

Yes.

The domiciled Canadian banks are finally waking up to the fact that the world have changed. The Bank of Montreal (now BMO) which used to operate here, sold its business and it became Bank of the Bahamas. It saw the writing on the wall long ago. The writing on the wall is this: "The concept of a tax haven is a dead man walking.". Countries no longer can thumb their noses at other countries financial, tax and currency laws in this global village with the global treaties for Anti-Money-Laundering, Criminal Rackets etc.

In the old days, the mob came to the Bahamas or went to Cuba to generate gambling money. Casinos were outlawed in the US. They were welcomed there until Fidel came to power. We started holding the wallets for people hiding money from their taxman. We called it financial services. It's real name name was "Avoid Taxation and Subsequent Prosecution". We bet our future on it. It was sort of winked-at. It was like smoking cigarettes -- all of the sophisticates did it. Well it turns out that smoking is now regulated and so is tax evasion and the lesser tax avoidance.

The global moving of funds by terrorist groups, drug cartels and criminal elements necessitated the regulation of tax shelters and the movement of money. We are still living in the past hoping and praying that it will all fix itself.

Because we have become accustomed to thumbing our noses at the laws of other countries, we have come to believe that it is our God-given right to do anything that we please, and call it a pillar of the economy.

Even the village idiot (Perry Christie included) will eventually notice that what we call "Financial Services" will eventually dwindle away to nothing.

The ironic bit, is that if settled down, revamped and modernised the infrastructure and became centres of banking excellence, we wouldn't need to be a tax haven. We could be an international banking centre for trade and commerce, and we would be sought-after if we did not expose ourselves to the vagaries of the large American banks. But we always did go after the low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit gets rotten the quickest.

If you stand up and say anything, any outstanding work permit applications will suddenly slow down even more.