Blue Tel Confident Of BaTelCo Victory

by Amanda Banks, Tax-News.com, London

03 March 2003

As the Bahamian government mulls its options with regard to choosing a strategic partner to help it run the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BaTelCo), one of the interested parties, Blue Telecommunications (Bahamas) Ltd told the Nassau Guardian last week of its confidence over the deal.

The Blue Tel team combines a good balance of local knowledge and specialist and management expertise, according to Blue Tel president, Lindbergh Smith. Partnering with the Bahamian organisation are privatisation experts Detecon & Diebold International, Deutsche Telekom, international accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and three other - as yet unnamed - international financial institutions.

However, Blue Tel's bid is unusual in that it is the only Bahamian-led registered company in the running.

'We feel that the Blue Consortium is extremely well positioned in this process, as the only bidder that offers the perfect combination of strong local knowledge and unparalleled international telecommunication expertise,' Mr Smith told the Nassau Guardian.

Fellow consortium member and Detecon executive, Dirk Muenning supported this, continuing:

'The key is to have the local business knowledge and cultural understanding so that at the end of the day, the services we want to sell as an operator and the revenues we are expecting of course to come from the local people we want to serve, can only be achieved if we have the right partners for it.'

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