President of CoopEnergy Barbados knocks Nation Newspaper Editorial – A troubled partnership in a comment on the BAMC Breaks Contract With CoopEnergy, Mediation Fails Barbados Underground blog.
Mr Observer, your stance is noted and understood. You do seem to have a much better grasp of the situation than most, and this clearly includes the Nation’s recent editorial on August 21.
One would have expected that such an editorial would have researched the kind of resources available to CoopEnergy before concluding that “many were skeptical as CoopEnergy had no track record in this area of activity”.
We do not recall such serious concerns being raised when completely unknown entities suddenly arrive on the scene in areas such as building fly-overs, acquiring Covid vaccines, or providing hundred-million-dollar housing solutions for Barbadians.
A simple check would have revealed that CoopEnergy has access to numerous highly qualified and experienced engineering, financial, accounting and management experts with extensive local backgrounds, as well as full support from massive international cooperative agencies that are designed exactly to provide such support.
The editorial’s statement about “the large sums of about $100 million earmarked for the project raising concerns” is only possible out of complete lack of research into the present realities of the energy market.
Annually, Barbados spends $ 1 BILLION ($1000 million) just on the fossil fuels that we purchase with foreign exchange, and which we then literally burn to power the country.
A long term investment valued at 10% of that annual expense – that then results in an annual savings of even 5% of the annual foreign currency outflow for fossil fuel would be one of the best investment options available anywhere – except perhaps in the weapons industry.
Then for the editorial to make conclusions about CoopEnergy’s capacity to turn the industry around – that are based solely on BAMC’s poor performance is 2025 – after our exclusion, and given the well documented workers-related issues that subsequently arose, can only be characterized as malicious.
Finally the editorial makes repeated reference to the ‘failed MOU’, while the actual shareholders’ agreement, a contract signed between all the participating agencies, is the actual point of departure between CoopEnergy and BAMC. A simple search would have made this known.
It is actually quite inconceivable that the Nation could editorialize such dogmatic conclusions as Minister Weir’s public statement for the cause of termination as factual, without have view of the actual Shareholders’ Agreement, or at least via a reference to interviews with the actual parties involved.
Perhaps it may be that the Nation is relying a bit too much on artificial intelligence to compose their editorials rather than an effort to negatively influence public opinion against CoopEnergy. This is surprising, considering the accuracy and clarity of their front page article of Tuesday August 18.
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.