The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

MARCO City MP Greg Moss yesterday said stakeholders should use the opportunity Baha Mar’s debacle has provided to improve the country’s tourism product ahead of the resort’s planned opening.

Mr Moss, an independent MP, said the Baha Mar project was doomed for failure because airlift to this country has not been increased in a way that would suggest the development is sustainable to compete with the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island.

“Baha Mar never made sense unless we were able to more than double our tourist arrival,” he said, when contacted for comment.

“Either it would’ve been a failure or it would’ve taken tourists from Atlantis, causing that to fail. In a sense, the failure of Baha Mar is good for the Bahamas because as things are currently going, we would not have had the critical mass of tourists that would help both succeed. I think a problem was that we always allowed the construction to get ahead of expanding our tourism market to ensure it could ultimately be supported.

“We now have the opportunity to go out and see what is wrong with our tourism product. How to go beyond near propaganda in how we market our country and improve our product? Is it that we need to deal with crime? Bring more dimensions to tourism?

“What is the answer? As this stall continues, the business side of Baha Mar needs to be well thought out.”

Mr Moss also said Bahamians should use the period in which Baha Mar is trying to right its ship to rethink its relationship with China given this country’s historic relationship with the United States.

“I think Baha Mar is an interesting exercise in not only over emphasising a particular development as being that thing to spur economic development, but also in the conflict between our coordination of national policy with the United States and the foray into expanding our connections with China,” he said.

Unlike some, Mr Moss did not lay much blame for the Baha Mar debacle at the feet of the Christie administration.

“I don’t believe in governments being in the fore of business ventures. I don’t support a model with government determining the outcome of economic dealings with different parties. But I think what’s obvious is government never anticipated this particular outcome. The government was perhaps too quick to allow the incestuous relationship between the China Export-Import Bank as the major lender and the China Construction company as its contractor.”

On Monday, Baha Mar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. That same day, Baha Mar’s more than 2,000 employees were sent home and told to no longer physically report to work. The resort has said it will honour salary payments for a time, however CEO Sarkis Izmirlian conceded that if the property cannot reach an agreement with its lender, tough decisions will have to be made.