Former Bahamasair managing director Paul Major has been appointed the new consultant to the Domestic Investment Board.
He is charged with the task of bringing more Bahamians into the economic mainstream.
Financial Services and Investments Basil Albury said yesterday that Mr Major will play a significant role in creating new legislation, such as the proposed Tourism Attraction Incentive Act.
Addressing members of the board and the press at the Ministry of Financial Services and Investments, Mr Albury explained that that this new Tourism Act will offer Bahamians what the Hotel Encouragement Act has traditionally offered foreign investors.
Such an act, he added, would offer Bahamians incentives to invest more in their own country, and help them to benefit more from the spin-off effects of the growing tourism industry.
Giving an example of the advantages of the Act, Mr Albury said that in the sports fishing industry, Bahamians who so far have only been employees, can bring their own sports boats into the country free of duty and ultimately become self-employed.
Mr Major said that it is very important that Bahamians learn to “think big.”
“I’ve been making a pitch in the political arena that we’ve got to get away from thinking small business,” he said.
He pointed out that ‘small business’ in Bahamian vernacular is an investment of “$50,000, $100,000, maybe a quarter million dollars.”
In the United States, Mr Major said, the small businesses start at the $5 million mark.
Mr Major said that it is impossible for Bahamians to not only compete with only foreign investors, but also with established local investors, unless there is access to capital “by those who have been deprived of it for so long”.
“And there’s no shortage of ideas, we all know stories of Bahamians who have come up with great ideas, who’ve had them taken away from them because they didn’t have funding to do it and they end up being either minuscule shareholders or kicked out, while the business goes on to survive,” he said.
By KARIN HERIG, The Tribune
