The Tribune

IF there’s anything that COVID-19 has taught us, it is how global events can cause local effects.

So it was with a virus first spotted in China, so it is with the economic effects that go with its aftermath.

Rupert Roberts has sounded a warning bell for the prospect of an increase in your supermarket bill. It’s not because he’s trying to make more money over at Super Value – it’s just the increased costs that look like they’re coming in the wake of the pandemic.

That includes inflation – or reflation you might say given how the world’s economies collapsed. There are also increases in freight and trucking costs. In some cases, it’s simply a surge in supply and not being able to meet the demand.

Mr Roberts has warned of around a ten percent increase, maybe 12 percent. Beef prices, for example, are up by 12 percent. Grits are up by as much as 20 percent.

It’s not because of events on our doorstep, it’s because of events around the world – and especially in the United States. As we said, global events, local effects.

It likely won’t be isolated to food businesses either, of course – and other companies that depend on foreign supply chains would do well to follow Mr Roberts’ advice of locking in prices as much as you can before they go even higher.

Can we do anything to change that in the future? Well, Minister of Agriculture Michael Pintard was in Parliament yesterday highlighting that The Bahamas imports around $1bn worth of food products. He wants to reduce that by around $200m, with that demand being met by local products.

His solutions are in the early stages, too early to make an impact in a hurry, but reducing our dependency on foreign imports would be a good thing – keeping money in the country rather than seeing it go to foreign banks.

For now, though, be prepared for a more expensive end to the year. It’s been a rollercoaster getting through this pandemic and its effects – and it’s not over yet.

Oban errors

Remember the Oban deal? It’s more than three years since the $5.5bn deal was done with the goal of revolutionising the Grand Bahama landscape. You’ll notice no such revolution has taken place.

Even at the time, it looked a mess. The Tribune did the due diligence that the government seemed to neglect. For example, the non-executive chairman, Peter Krieger, had been accused of misappropriating more than $3.7m of investor’s money by US government regulators and was also a defendant in a legal action by a Bahamas-based manager for a sister company of the insolvent CLICO. Others involved also raised questions over the experience claimed by Oban’s senior vice-president, while another individual listed as a member of the leadership team came as a surprise to his chief executive at another company. Then with the signing of the deal itself there were questions over who actually signed the documents, with Mr Krieger signing someone else’s name on the document. It was, in short, a mess.

Minister of Agriculture Michael Pintard yesterday described the Oban deal as a “rookie mistake”, with reference to the ceremonial signing.

He said it was “a clumsy execution of a ceremonial signing, a signing that was done according to law but a simulation of it, that is a reproduction of it, it was clumsy… I think it was a clumsy signing, a rookie’s mistake, but was there a concoction? Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.”

The thing with mistakes is that you have to learn from them, and take corrective action, or you’re doomed to repeat them.

Was it also a mistake to seemingly not thoroughly check out the credentials of the company being entered into an agreement with? If so, what changed? Who was responsible for the mistakes, and what action was taken to prevent them from happening again?

When asked in 2019 about the Oban deal, Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis said he “ain’t talking nonsense today” which showed how far away from a multi-billion dollar deal we had gone.

There was even a police investigation into a missing Oban Energies file, but that trundled on for more than a year without anything happening and we’ve heard little since then Commissioner Anthony Ferguson’s shrug in March 2019.

Rookie mistakes are one thing. Rookie mistakes when it comes to $5.5bn deals are another. Oban burned the FNM badly early in its term. But shouldn’t we know more by now about what went wrong – and what has changed?