And I think that you are a shill for BPC (I stand corrected with the name). Obviously you want to hide the penny stock play, which I have seen played out all over the world. Statistically, junior resources companies have a success rate of 0.01 of one percent. It's all about the stock play baby, and if you say it aint so, you are a liar. And you say that it spent $50 million and yet the market cap fluctuates between 12 to 46 million Great Britain pounds. It jumped from 1 penny to 3 pence on fake news in May, and it was a typical stock flog on fake news -- the way that all penny stocks operate.

It's obvious that Bahamians, including the press are too naive and gullible to understand that BPL is a penny stock play and nothing else. There isn't any oil. The company has sat on its ass for years doing nothing but churning stock out and making millions for the majority the stock owners, the promoters, and doing sweet f%^k all else. And Neil Hartnell, is merely a stenographer shill, printing their BS without even educating himself on how junior resource companies work with flogging stock and never actually find a resource. This is a penny stock play, pure and simple, with no intention of finding oil, and everyone is swallowing the BS. Hartnell should be ashamed of himself. Doesn't he ask the question on how the company sustained itself in the past 5 years and why they haven't produced anything. Why haven't they asked Potter and the rest of the BPL "executive" what their holdings are. The naivety blows me away. There is no sophistication in the business sector at all, and Hartnell is out of his league.

The problem with the port authority is absentee ownership (at least on a day-to-day basis) and as a result the port authority leadership (especially the CEO) is a cancer on Grand Bahama. They want to make a tech hub, and yet I have known a tech entrepreneur, who after talking to the CEO of the port authority, didn't want anything to do with Grand Bahama or the Port Authority, or the Bahamas for that matter.

He is one extremely weird person. Being in his presences gives me the heebie jeebies and I don't know why.

I take a less emotional, more pragmatic point of view. The webshops have had their day in the sun. They will be taxed to death. The operators have already made their millions. The government will horn in because they are short of cash. However, it is human nature to gamble -- in one fell stroke to be rich.

So what's the next move in this evolutionary cycle? Online crypto-gambling. There are already many offerings about to arise. I predict that Bahamians will be gambling with crypto-currencies in much fairer games with larger prizes than with what the pathetic Bahamian webshops have been fleecing the desperate public. The added advantage is that Bahamians won't be stuck with Bahamian dollars.

Contactless tap cards have been around other more advanced countries for years. This is news ??????

No worries. It just means that police officers will become Facebook addicts.

Poor Mr. Deluded Coulson. Several cogent facts.

1) The value of BPC -- Bahamas Petroleum Company plc (AIM:BPC), a UK£15.48M small-cap, operates in the oil and gas industry which has seen a prolonged oil price downturn

2) It's headquartered in the Isle of Man and not the Bahamas.

3) It's price has been manipulated to 3 pence a share from one pence a share. This is a junior resource play solely for the stock appreciation profits of the owners and not really to find oil

4) The Bahamian wells are in a dry area, not anywhere near the only 3 producing wells of Cuba.

5) Mr. Coulson is obviously not aware of the junior resource penny stock plays of which less than 100th of 1 percent actually produce a well or a mine. It is all about the stocks.

6) One wonders if there was payment involved to say the things in this article.

7) There een no erl -- period. All of the big players have pulled out of Cuba plays.

8) BPC has done nothing except Look-Busy-Jesus-Is-Coming analysis of old data.

Sigh ....

What you say is true -- the average wage in the Bahamas is not a livable wage. However, you can't raise it because it would actually decrease economic output. The cost of labour would be too high when factored with the cost of energy, the cost of importing absolutely everything and the cost of duty on imports.

In a vibrant economy, humans are considered to be assets. The term is human capital. These human assets provide value to the business. However the value of Bahamian human capital is quite low. This is as a result of a low productivity culture, a poorly educated, barely literate population, a flawed socio-economic fabric with a majority of households being single-parent households, the prevalence of soft crime, like employee shoplifting, embezzlement, tiefin', stealing and time wasting. Hence, you cannot pay a living wage if productivity of the human capital does not warrant it. Quite frankly, in the business world, our human capital is of inferior quality in the context of the first pillar of the economy -tourism. For example, I just vacationed in Mauritius. The workers are motivated, hardworking, customer oriented and earn about 26,000 MUR per year, which translates to about $8,000 per year. Yet productivity grew 4% (defined by the ratio of capital investment to capital output).

So, paying Bahamians more would further decrease our competitiveness and further create more unemployment. And they can't live on what they make. It is a problem that probably does not have a solution, and is a harbinger of a lot of economic pain and turmoil for a majority of Bahamians in the coming years -- until the rising oceans swallow up the Bahamas in 2030. Then Bahamians will be building rafts to get to the US, and the Coast Guard will treat us like we treat the Haitian illegals now -- rounded up and put on the highest ground like drowning, crowded rats on a once-beautiful and larger land.

It burned down in February of 1958. It was rebuilt several years later, but fell on hard times. It was losing money and they wanted government subsidies that never happened, but the government still wanted high licence fees. There are stories of race horses starving to death after the closure.