Desperate for votes and playing to anti-foreign sentiments, PLP Opposition Leader, Perry Christie made one final last ditch attempt to thwart the sale of BTC to Cable & Wireless Communications (C&WC).<\/p>\n
Christie issued his strongest threat yet against the company set to takeover the Bahamas Telecommunications company.<\/p>\n
Cable and Wireless Communications was supposed to take control of BTC yesterday, April 4, 2011, after paying $210 million for a 51 per cent stake in the government-owned utility. Later that day, the new company management was to meet with unions leaders representing BTC workers, as they move towards a smooth transition of management.<\/p>\n
Mr Christie, in a published statement entitled “Final warning on BTC”,\u00a0 said the whole deal is “contrary to the national interest” and “will not stand” if the PLP is elected back into power.<\/p>\n
Calling C&W a “foreign company”, Mr Christie continued to play on racial discrimination and anti-foreigner sentiments so common in the Bahamas.<\/p>\n
“No one can say in the circumstances of this transaction and our publicly stated and clear position, that they do not know what to expect from a future PLP administration. Buyer beware! Cease and desist! Do not proceed! I cannot be more clear on this. This is an affront to the Bahamian people.<\/p>\n
“We will use all lawful means available to us to ensure that it will not stand,” said the PLP leader, reiterating and reaffirming a threat first issued in the midst of the sale process in a manner which indicates that the PLP’s position on the matter is not set to change in light of the formalisation of the sale.”<\/p>\n
Saying he would ignore the legal implications of the deal, Mr Christie said if the PLP is elected, he intends to have a “full public inquiry into the sale of BTC’s assets to C&WC”, suggesting that there are “too many unanswered questions about this deal.”<\/p>\n
Mr Christie’s stance is hypocritical since it was the PLP that tried to sell BTC to a mysterious foreign company before they were voted out of power in 2007.<\/p>\n
Their secret strategy backfired. It ended in disaster and turned into an embarrassing spectacle for the leadership of the PLP.<\/p>\n
Unlike Mr Christie’s secret deal to Bluewater, the FNM government has kept the entire process transparent by tabling all of the documents connected to the sale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Desperate for votes and playing to anti-foreign sentiments, PLP mob boss Perry Christie threatens to “dismantle” BTC deal if he is elected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":[12],"tags":[36,60,43],"class_list":["post-7471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","tag-btc","tag-plp","tag-telecommunications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7471","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\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}