Bahamasair suspends flights to Haiti’s capital

By NEIL HARTNELL Tribune Business Editor nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMASAIR’S weekly jet service to Cape Haitien has been “leaving full every time” even though service to the country’s capital has been suspended from January 28, its managing director revealed yesterday.

Tracy Cooper told Tribune Business the increasing instability and deteriorating security situation in Portau-Prince had upended the national flag carrier’s Haiti business model to the extent that flights to the northern coastal city are departing with 98 percent average load factors (passenger capacity).

The demand has forced Bahamasair to deploy one of its 138-seater jets to the route, marking a reversal from when Portau-Prince would have been the prime destination and merited such capacity. The airline suspended services to the Haitian capital one day after it was reported that five Bahamians from Bahamasair were unable to leave Port-au-Prince’s airport due to protests by police force members over gang-related killings of their comrades.

“We have suspended flights into Port-au-Prince,” Mr Cooper confirmed to this newspaper. “We did our last flight on January 28. Then the suspension went into February and it will stay in place until we can see a better situation in Port-au-Prince. But we have seen this trending for a while.

“What we were seeing is that persons were not travelling to Port-au-Prince; they were travelling more to Cape Haitien for a while.” As a result, Bahamasair had

By NEIL HARTNELL Tribune Business Editor nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

THE MINISTRY of Finance’s top official says business tenants must accurately identify their landlord to prevent 10-15 percent of real property tax bills from being returned annually to the Government without payment.

Simon Wilson, the financial secretary, also sought to reassure companies leasing their premises that the Government was likely to deploy a “more powerful tool” than garnishing their rental payments in cracking down on commercial landlords delinquent in their real property tax payments.

Many businesses have voiced concern this potential intervention in the landlord-tenant relationship could leave them in breach of lease agreement obligations when it comes to rental payments, but he revealed the Department of Inland Revenue will likely first turn to enhanced “powers of sale” granted in the Real Property Tax amendments that passed with last May’s Budget.