By INDERIA SAUNDERS, Guardian Business Reporter
The general manager of the troubled Ritz Carlton project on Rose Island asserts the company is not about to throw in the towel — instead looking across shores to Canada and the U.K. to get the additional funding needed.
"We're talking to other banking institutions, we're talking to some of the Canadian banks and we're also talking to some of the British banks," said Russell Miller. "There are conversations happening across the board [and] we're looking at every opportunity possible."
The developers were planning a $700 million project on Rose Island before the collapse of its major investor Lehman Brothers earlier this month. Lehman - which sold the Royal Oasis Resort in Freeport to an Irish group a year ago - reportedly has invested $100 million in the Rose Island project to date.
Miller could not say when the developers expect the securing of financing to be done, although he was optimistic that the project would receive the additional funding. He also could not offer when the marina-component of the project, scheduled to be completed in the beginning of next year, would be finished in the project's current state.
"We were going to start to do some infrastructure but we don't know right now, everything is being re-assessed and analyzed," he said. "The marina development, which I think is huge, was the right thing for us to do at the beginning of the project.
"It adds at least a $40-50 million price tag on that property just by doing that marina development."
The project was billed to create 800 permanent new jobs and hundreds more during the construction phase. Sixty condo-hotel units, almost 60 private villas, 50 marina town homes and 135 exclusive estate homes are all planned as part of the development, in addition to a 300-slip marina.
Lehman was just one of the Wall Street titans imperiled by bad investments. The crisis prompted U.S. government authorities to push for a $700 billion bailout, which President George W. Bush believes could stave off a "long and painful recession."
Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham indicated last week in the House of Assembly that while the government was "carefully monitoring the evolving international crisis and its likely economic impact and/or consequence in The Bahamas," it could not yet make any final judgments about the likely magnitude and duration of the crisis.
"It is not easy to make a firm determination as to the duration or magnitude of the problem because problems continue to arise every hour," said Ingraham, pointing to the recent purchase of Wachovia by Citigroup, and the bailout of the Belgium-based Fortis by the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
"And so, to that extent, we are following the restructuring exercise that is taking place on Wall Street which is impacting economies all over the world and The Bahamas being no exemption," the prime minister said, referring to an earlier rejection of a U.S. $700 billion bailout plan for troubled investment banks. "Here in The Bahamas, there are a number of enterprises that have been affected negatively as a result of the event."
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