Pelican Bay an Artist’s Concept
Basseterre, St. Kitts – Nevis
May 14, 2013 (CUOPM)
The US$90 million Pelican Bay Development at Potato Bay, St. Kitts, will result in increased revenue flows for workers from various fields throughout St. Kitts and Nevis, new income streams for professionals from a wide range of specialties and additional business opportunities for suppliers and service providers from across the Federation.
“In addition, this investment is expected to generate revenue flows to the Treasury of some US$10 million in direct government taxes and fees alone,” said St. Kitts and Nevis’ Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. Dr. Denzil L. Douglas during a ground breaking ceremony for the project which falls under the Citizenship by Investment Programme.
He told scores of invited guests that the project, which is expected to be completed and operational by the end of 2014 that it will help to stimulate visitor interest in the Federation as prospective visitors see not only what St. Kitts and Nevis has to offer compared to other destinations, but also the ever-expanding visitor options that are being made available within the Federation itself.
Prime Minister Douglas congratulated Sterling Asset Management of Jamaica, Surrey Paving of Jamaica and the St. Kitts-based Construction Technologies (CONTEC) for their partnership in the project.
He singled out Mr. Charles Ross, owner of Sterling Asset Management (Jamaica); Mr. Leslie Chang, owner of Surrey Paving and Aggregates (St. Lucia) and Messrs. Lincoln Pemberton, Troy Douglas, and Ian Kelsick, owners of Construction Technologies (CONTEC, St. Kitts).
“We have worked with each of them before, it is their forward-thinking and imaginative approach that led to the conception and promotion this hotel condominium development, and we warmly welcome the opportunity to work with them again,” said Dr. Douglas.
The St. Kits and Nevis leader noted that the world was rapidly changing and traditional donor countries were not terribly interested in providing aid to anyone, any more.
“Many of the world’s traditionally strongest nations were experiencing severe financial difficulties of their own. And St. Kitts and Nevis found itself in that strange situation where, as our policies yielded greater and greater social and economic benefits for our people, the less access we could have to concessional arrangements that were created to aid weak and struggling nations. In other words, self-reliance was increasingly becoming the order of the day,” said Dr. Douglas.
He said that in light of the international financial and economic climate the only option of his St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Government was bringing the best minds together to develop a well-thought out, financially sound, pro-growth development model that would insulate the country from the ravages of the global economic crisis, provide opportunities for the social and economic advancement of Kittitians and Nevisians and maintain the nation’s reputation as a well-managed, stable economy in which, as the IMF and other international specialists at the recent Caribbean Growth Forum stressed, “˜investor confidence remains strong.’ This is what we set out to do, and this is what we have done.”
Prime Minister Douglas stressed that St. Kitts and Nevis is but a tiny speck in a complex global whole – each country competing for investment dollars, each attempting to attract the kinds of capital injections on which all states ““ large and small ““ depend.
“And so we set about developing just the right mix of incentives, concessions, and tax policies to make St. Kitts and Nevis a highly attractive option when compared with competing options. We committed ourselves to ensuring that fiscal affairs of this country were managed in such a way, our civil servants provided for in such a way, and our public sector developed in such a way that investors ““ whether local or foreign ““ after assessing us with calm objectivity, would feel fully confident – fully confident – stepping forward to invest the millions of dollars at their disposal right here. This, as you have seen for several months how, is being done with steady and impressive regularity,” said Dr. Douglas.