The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation (BCCEC) yesterday said it was still “ironing out the mechanics” for a domestic arbitration centre, a facility it still hopes to launch in the 2015 first quarter.

Edison Sumner, the BCCEC’s chief executive. told Tribune Business: “That plan is still in train. We’re still working out the details.  We have some timelines in which we want to see this actually materialise, which is in this quarter.

“We are woking towards getting it done. We have decided we will largely adopt the International Court of Arbitration rules for this, and we are putting together other parts of the framework for how we want to see it structured; who we would want on the various arbitration panels, and going through that process. If all comes together, we expect to see a launch, at least in its initial phases, some time in this quarter.”

The Chamber has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government for the development of a domestic arbitration centre in the Bahamas. One of its primary advantages is billed as reduced time and costs associated with commercial dispute resolution.

Dianne Saunders-Adderley, head of the Chamber’s alternative dispute resolution (ADR) division, told Tribune Business: “We are right now discussing some of the finer details on how it would work. We need to make sure we have the users of the facility at the centre more so than the service providers. We are ironing out the mechanics of it such that we can give a benefit to the members more so than anyone else.”

 She added: “Each dispute has to be taken on its own merit. Each business and sector is different. The administration of those businesses are different. You can’t just prepare a rubber stamp process or rubber stamp the whole idea of ADR because some organisations may not have a lot of things that would be necessary to bring a proper case to court and, in those cases, ADR would be very favourable.

“You also have larger organisations which, despite the benefits of ADR, there are other international partners who may have a preference toward the finality of a court proceeding. You may have the pressure steering in that direction.

“Even though the organisation may be big, that may not be the case for every size dispute, so one has to be very careful in how you promote ADR,” Ms Saunders-Adderley said.

“ADR has a wide spectrum of different tools, from mediation and ideas like conciliation, all the way up to arbitration. Each one of those call for different internal understandings, expertise and level of compromise. We have to educate our members, specifically the Chamber members, to what the service is. The framework and the system that the Chamber would set up would have to reflect the delicacies of the different case scenarios.”