The Inter-American Development (IDB) recently made moves to strengthen the Customs Department, providing $200,000 in funding to provide technical assistance.
“It’s in an effort to modernize revenue operations in the country,” State Minister for Finance Zhivargo Laing confirmed to Guardian Business yesterday.
According to an IDB statement released on Tuesday, “the program will assist the Customs Department of The Bahamas with the implementation of customs training modules [and] the restructuring of the training function within the department.”
Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham earlier stated that the department was set to undergo major reform and ...

Nearly all of the secret United States State Department cables on The Bahamas in the possession of online whistleblower Wikileaks date from the period 2004 to 2010, according to data compiled by the German news magazine Der Spiegel.
Wikileaks turned over the more than 250,000 cables to Der Spiegel, the Spanish paper El Pais, the French paper Le Monde and the British paper The Guardian. The Guardian shared the documents with the New York Times.
There are 394 cables on The Bahamas. Since Wikileaks and the media companies began releasing the documents on November 28, only four cables on The Bahamas have been published by The Guardian. Two were on relations between The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Isl ...

Dear Editor,

BTC can be likened to a mother who has a lot of children, but no real man in her life. Up to now she has been playing the fathers off against each other depending on the situations – mostly political, but earlier in the month she made a choice where she barred a couple of the sweethearts in the hope of establishing herself. However, the house she wants to have control of requires that she deal with fellows she has kicked to the curb – they still hold the papers. The fact that the children are now grown up, add to the problem, they now see themselves as part-owners of something that they have no legal title to. The children’s perception of what is real has be ...

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

Doctors Hospital Health Systems (DHHS) suffered a $914,000 swing into the red via a $307,000 loss in its 2011 third quarter, although for the first nine months it remains in the black - albeit after suffering an 82.1 per cent net income decline year-over-year.

Careful expense containment, as evidenced by a $1 million or 3.3 per cent reduction in total expenses to $29.435 million for the nine months to end-October 2010, combined with a strong balance sheet that has $27.244 million in net assets and is free of long-term debt, has helped Doctors Hospital ride out the worst effects of the recession on its top line.

Joseph Krukowski, Doctors Hospital's cha ...