The Hotel Corporation has now realized that it should get out of the hotel business once and for all. Chairman Michael Scott says he is intent on selling the “millstone” that is the last government-owned hotel, Andros’s Lighthouse Club. The hotel is costing Bahamian taxpayers over $500,000 per year to keep afloat.
Scheck Industries, a development group from the United States, has expressed interest in the hotel and Mr Scott said he is inclined to accept the offer.
Scott also reportedly said that the Ingraham government does not want to attempt to create “a second Freeport” in the southern Bahamas on the island of Mayaguana.
The concept, intiated by the Perry Christie administration, was thought by most people to be nothing more than a sweetheart deal for the i-Group, a Boston-based developer. Now, Mr Scott has said that having a foreign developer act as a quasi-governmental authority was inherently a “flawed concept” that would have created several conflicts of interest for the government.
Mr Scott is reported to have described the “claw back” provisions in the original deal a “joke”. The devleoper was granted nearly 6,000 acres of Crown Land after paying only $2 million dollars. The agreement also allowed the developers to expand their holdings to almost 10,000 acres, plus another 2,000 acres when the airpoirt was completed and anther 2,000 acres upon completion of the infrastructure and botique shops.
Yet, the “claw back” provision, which supposedly would allow the government to reclaim the land if the developers failed to meet the milestones, would have provided for the retun of less than 2,000 acres to the government.
The FNM government is said to have revised the heads-of-agreement with the iGroup, creating a more equitable framework and ensuring that the $100 million build-out occurs in a longer, more realistic time-frame of ten years.
