Today is the deadline for companies to submit preliminary bids for 49 per cent of state-owned Bahamas Telecommunications Company. <\/P><\/p>\n
\nThe Bahamas Government is to maintain 51 per cent in the public’s interest. <\/P><\/p>\n
Senior vice-president and chief operations officer Leon Williams has confirmed that eight companies have completed due diligence with the prospect of offering a bid on BaTelCo. <\/P><\/p>\n
He said the eight are: Cable & Wireless, Sercortel, Trans World Telecoms, Citigroup, Blu Tel Communications Network, J P Morgan, Ripplewood Holdings, and Digicel. <\/P><\/p>\n
The government is hoping to create a fully wired, liberalised competitive environment for telecommunications in The Bahamas. <\/P><\/p>\n
And, in order to make BaTelCo a viable investment, Mr. Williams said the company is putting best practices in place in terms of management and reorganisation. <\/P><\/p>\n
The restructuring process started in 1998 when the former government acquired the services of London-based telecommunications group Deutsche Morgan Grenfell for advice on the privatisation exercise. <\/P><\/p>\n
Then in 1999, an estimated $80 million was paid out in separation packages to about 500 BaTelCo employees. <\/P><\/p>\n
Meanwhile, BaTelCo has placed a moratorium on any new celluar phones as the network reaches near capacity, resulting in frequent call drop-offs and less than acceptable levels of toll-quality voice services. <\/P><\/p>\n
It would take an estimated $28 million to upgrade BaTelCo’s cellular services to an acceptable level, once the improvement project is approved by Cabinet. <\/P><\/p>\n
By Lindsay Thompson, The Nassau Guardian<\/B><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eight companies to submit bids for 49 per cent; government to keep 51 per cent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}