A LOCAL BUSINESSMAN HAS COMPLAINED about the length of time it takes to get financing from some financial institutions in the region.
Neil Weekes, general manager of C. O. Williams Construction, lamented the situation as he spoke on the sidelines of the CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank’s recent Public Private Partnerships In Infrastructure Development and Finance conference at Atlantis Hotel in The Bahamas.
Weekes said he was particularly upset that multilateral financing institutions such as the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and the World Bank refused to finance unsolicited bids for infrastructure projects in the region.
Weekes told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY: “We want to be able [find infrastructure solutions] for Barbados based on our track record and on our ability to raise financing to bring whole design build and finance packages to the Government.
“But the Government because of the rules that it has to follow through the tendering process and such like, it is not as easy as being able to do that. And there is also the issue of transparency.”
“As I made the point, transparency can be achieved with unsolicited bids by getting all of the stakeholders involved and discussing it in an open forum because it is not a C. O. Williams solution; it is a solution for Barbados.”
Weekes explained: “An unsolicited bid is a contractor or individual seeing a potential problem and going to the Government and saying, ‘We see that you are going to have an issue here; we have a solution’.
“You present your solution – they go over it and say, ‘We can work with that’ and then you bring everything else to the table to get the project done. The problem is that a lot of people have issues with that.”
But in a presentation during one of the panel discussions, Allison Davis, portfolio manager at the CDB, made it clear that the bank could not consider unsolicited bids for financing because of issues with transparency of the process.
She noted too that in recent years the private sector seemed more interested in undertaking borrowing for infrastructure projects.
“Public-private sector partnerships (PPPs) seem to be the modality that will be used. They are new to the region and there have been some success stories but there have also been some not-so-good stories and unfortunately, those are the ones that are publicized,” she told the gathering.
In her assessment, however, the public sector in many countries was not quite ready to “step up to the plate in these partnerships”.
She added: “There seems to be a lack of expertise in terms of institutional capacity to design, evaluate and also monitor such projects.”
In this connection, she pointed out that the CDB was working on building that capacity.