While the company has maintained a presence within the Caribbean through local dealers who specialize in the sales and service of Cummins marine engines and generators, the company plans to grow its power generation business over the next year by providing dedicated support for Cummins commercial and residential generators. David Hagewood, Vice President of Power Generation Sales and Marketing stated, “We are pleased to have the opportunity to serve the generator needs of the Bahamas and Turk & Caicos Islands. We look forward to partnering with local businesses to provide world class support of Cummins Power Generation products and providing the exceptional customer service for which Cummins is well known.”

Detailed information on the company and the expansion in the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos may be obtained by visiting the company’s website at www.cumminspowersouth.com/bahamas/.

Established in 2006, Cummins Power South, LLC is a joint venture distributorship within the Cummins North American Distributor System. Cummins Power South specializes in the sales and service of all Cummins engines, generators and related products within Georgia, Florida, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, as well as selected areas of the Caribbean. Cummins Power South is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) with service locations in Atlanta, Albany, Augusta, Gainesville, Savannah, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Miami, Ocala, Orlando, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Chattanooga, TN. Additional information about the company may be found at www.cumminspowersouth.com

Turks & Caicos Premier, Hon. Dr. Rufus Ewing.

The definitive investment event, aimed at educating U.S. investors about the viability and diversity of investing in the last emerging market on earth, is organized by award-winning digital media solutions company, Hard Beat Communications, in conjunction with the governmental regional tourism grouping, the Caribbean Tourism Organization during Caribbean Week in New York City each June.

This year it will feature Premier Ewing along with his Finance Minister, Washington Misick, spotlighting on TCI. Both will showcase the myriad of opportunities available in the British-dependent territory, whose GDP has shown a consistent uptick in recent years.

Premier Ewing is part of an exciting agenda of the Avalon-presented forum, which will be more expansive and longer this year, with a broader focus from panels on the Caribbean and investment opportunities there, to invited exhibitors from the regional arms of the various investment agencies as well as other companies.
In commenting on his participation, Premier Ewing said: “I am delighted to be a part of the Third Annual Invest Caribbean Now Forum. This forum will give investors an opportunity to see and hear first-hand investment opportunities which are paramount to both our investors and our Beautiful by Nature Turks and Caicos Islands.”

Grace Lappin, managing partner of Avalon Partners, Ltd., and Tropical Destinations Expert for The Language of Luxury, said: “The Company is proud to spotlight on TCI this year, one of the countries in the emerging market of the Caribbean that is ripe with tremendous investment potential.”

Additionally, the forum will feature:

1: An address on The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, (FATCA) & The Caribbean, by a deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of the Treasury
2: Investing In The Caribbean Stock Exchanges – The Case Of Jamaica, by head of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, Mrs. Marlene Street-Forrest
3: Alan Loewenstein of Wedgewood Capital
4: Two panels on Development, Tourism, and Beyond TCI.

Media partners for ICN 2013 are: One Caribbean Television, The PR Newswire, CaribPR Wire, News Americas Now, South Florida Caribbean, Caribseek, Antigua Tribune, Bahamas Spectator, Barbados Gazette, British Caribbean News, Caribbean ET Roundup, Caribbean Financials, Cuba Chronicle, Dominica Gazette, Dominican Republic Post, Dutch Caribbean News, French Caribbean News, Grenada Chronicle, Guyana Inquirer, Haiti Gazette, Jamaica Inquirer, Puerto Rico Tribune, St. Kitts Gazette, St. Lucia Chronicle, St. Vincent Tribune and Trinidad Tribune.

For partnership and special sponsorship/branding opportunities log on to the sponsorship section of investcaribbeannow.com/ or email Joe Bernstein at joe@investcaribbeannow.com. Delegates can now register for early bird rates at events.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=7phqhyn6&oeidk=a07e6oz57kp0f880fbe

Supplementary information on the event can be found on the event’s pages on Facebook at www.facebook.com/invest.caribbean and on Twitter at twitter.com/InvestingCarib.

About Invest Caribbean Now

The Invest Caribbean Now forum is the brainchild of Persaud, whose goal is to boost U.S. investors’ interest and investment in the region of her birth. Since its inaugural year, the event has earned rave reviews and secured significant media coverage for its high powered attendees and presentations from top panelists, including: Wendell Dave Dowrich, vice president, Goldman Sachs; David Brillembourg, founder, chairman & chief executive officer, Brilla Group; Martin Mohabeer, managing director, Spackman Group and CEO of Spackman Capital; President and co-founder of Solamon Energy Corp, Jay Yeo; chairman and managing director of Blue Equity, LLC., Jonathan S. Blue and Lisa Lake, head of The Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship – Caribbean.

Panellists at the 2012 Invest Caribbean Now forum in NYC in June 2012. (Sharon Bennett image)

The event, organized since 2011 by award-winning digital media solutions company, Hard Beat Communications, in conjunction with the governmental regional tourism grouping, the Caribbean Tourism Organization, has attracted a high caliber of delegates in the past two years, including over 600 investment bankers, private equity investors, ministers’ of governments, hotel developers, tourism officials, architects, real estate developers, financial advisers, entrepreneurs and the media.

In 2013, the Avalon-presented forum will be more expansive, with a longer event and broader focus on the Caribbean and investment opportunities there through invited exhibitors from the regional arms of the various investment agencies as well as other companies.

A stellar agenda is already being developed that will include spotlighting the investment opportunities in the economically viable territory of The Turks & Caicos Islands, with attendance slated from a cadre of government and business leaders. Additionally, the forum will feature an address on The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, (FATCA) & The Caribbean, by a deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of the Treasury; Investing In The Caribbean Stock Exchanges – The Case Of Jamaica, by head of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, Mrs. Marlene Street, as well as opportunities in luxury real estate and marina development.

Invest Caribbean Now founder and Hard Beat Communications, CEO, Felicia Persaud, welcomed the partnership with Avalon for 2013.

“We are very excited to welcome Avalon as presenters this year in a forum that is definitively dedicated to connecting U.S. investors with opportunities in what is truly the last emerging market on earth – the Caribbean,” said Persaud. “Avalon Partners attended this event in our inaugural year and this year they are our lead sponsor – which shows we are doing something right.”

Grace Lappin, managing partner of Avalon Partners, Ltd., and Tropical Destinations Expert for The Language of Luxury, said the company’s marquee sponsorship of ICN 2013 marks Avalon’s commitment and dedication to promoting the region through the Invest Caribbean Now Forum.

“As someone who has worked in the Caribbean real estate market for many years, I feel it is critical to support this important event. ICN is a groundbreaking forum that spotlights the economic viability of this region, a region often overlooked even by savvy investors. We hope our emphasis and outreach will encourage investors to revisit this region’s rich potential and support its rightful placement in the global economy,” said Lappin.

Additional partners for ICN 2013 are One Caribbean Television, The PR Newswire, CaribPR Wire and News Americas Now. For partnership and special sponsorship/branding opportunities log on to the sponsorship section of investcaribbeannow.com/ or email Joe Bernstein at joe@investcaribbeannow.com.

About Invest Caribbean Now:
The Invest Caribbean Now forum is the brainchild of Persaud, whose goal is to boost U.S. investors’ interest and investment in the region of her birth. Since its inaugural year, the event has earned rave reviews and secured significant media coverage for its high powered attendees and presentations from top panelists, including: Wendell Dave Dowrich, vice president, Goldman Sachs; David Brillembourg, founder, chairman & chief executive officer, Brilla Group; Martin Mohabeer, managing director, Spackman Group and CEO of Spackman Capital; President and co-founder of Solamon Energy Corp, Jay Yeo; Chairman and Managing Director of Blue Equity, LLC., Jonathan S. Blue and Lisa Lake, head of The Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship – Caribbean. Supplementary information on the event can be found at InvestCaribbeanNow.com, the event’s pages on Facebook at and on Twitter. When tweeting about this event, use #InvestCarib.

About Avalon Partners:
Avalon Partners is a luxury boutique firm specializing in incomparable personalized service. Its client base spans the globe and seeks out Avalon because of the company’s integrity, experience, and dedication, as well as its reputation for excellence. The company represents owners, financiers, and developers of unique properties, luxurious villas, ocean front estates, exceptional homes, and investment and commercial properties.

Alith Misick Gardiner, in a letter to the TCI SUN newspaper, said her brother “is being made to suffer in one of the worst prisons in the world even though he was never charged with any crime.”

Misick, 46, is presently being held in a maximum security jail in Brazil after being arrested there on Friday December 7, 2012 on an Interpol red notice and a warrant from the Brazil Supreme Court.

Under an agreement with Brazil, the British authorities have 60 days from the date of arrest to formally request his extradition, according to the Turks and Caicos Islands’ (TCI) Attorney General’s office said in a statement on Jan. 9th.

But Misick Gardiner says her brother was arrested unlawfully and his human rights are being violated and that to date, the Brazilian Federal police has not offered their “family the very basic information; as to his detention, where he is being kept and what condition he is being held under, why are we not allowed to call him and why is he not allowed to call us.”

“It is shameful that what we know we have learned through the media,” she was quoted by the paper as saying.

Misick, an attorney-at-law, was living outside of TCI for about two years and on the basis of alleged political persecution in the Turks and Caicos Islands, he sought political asylum in Brazil where he had been living since October 2011 and had legal permission to reside and work until April 2013.

His request for political asylum was denied in November 2012 and he was in the process of appealing the decision when he was arrested by Brazilian police.

Misick’s brother, Washington Misick, who was a former chief minister is now the Minister of Finance; his nephew DonHue Gardiner is presently the minister of Immigration and his cousin Akeirra Misick is the Deputy Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands.

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Jan. 2013: A total of 55,742 criminal immigrants were sent packing from the U.S. and back to their homelands in the Caribbean and Latin America in 2012, New Americas has found.

Data NAN obtained and analyzed from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on deportee rates to Latin America and the Caribbean, found that while some 4,898 of all criminal immigrants were sent back to the Caribbean last year, Latin America accounted for over 12 time that number with 50,844.
A “criminal alien” is defined under U.S. immigration laws as a migrant who is convicted of a crime. Most of those deported were sent back for murders and sex and drug crimes.

Non-criminal immigrants deported to the Caribbean totaled 1,612 while to Latin America the number was a whopping 176,589. In total, the number of all immigrants sent back to the Caribbean region in 2012 was put at 6,510 by ICE and 227, 433 to Latin America.

But the number was actually a marked drop from 2011 when 14,912 Caribbean migrants were sent back and 555,801 Latin Americans.

For the Caribbean in 2012, the most criminal deportees were sent back to the Dominican Republic with a massive 2,264 while Jamaica was second with 1,213.

The rates for other countries were as follows:
Haiti: 758 total removals (568 criminal and 190 non-criminal);
Trinidad and Tobago: 242 total removals (187 criminal and 55 non-criminal);
Belize: 217 total removals (152 criminal and 65 non-criminal);
Guyana: 182 total removals (154 criminal and 28 non-criminal);
The Bahamas: 123 total removals (98 criminal and 25 non-criminal);
Cuba: 66 total removals (55 criminal and 11 non-criminal);
Barbados: 50 total removals (45 criminal and 5 non-criminal);
Dominica: 41 total removals (19 criminal and 22 non-criminal);
St. Kitts-Nevis: 40 total removals (32 criminal and 8 non-criminal);
Antigua & Barbuda: 36 total removals (25 criminal and 11 non-criminal)
St Lucia: 28 total removals (14 criminal and 14 non-criminal);
Grenada: 25 total removals (15 criminal and 10 non-criminal);
Turks Caicos Islands: 10 total removals (7 criminal and 3 non-criminal).
British Virgin Islands: 9 total removals (7 criminal and 2 non-criminal);
Bermuda: 8 total removals (5 criminal and 3 non-criminal);
Suriname: 6 total removals (6 criminal and 0 non-criminal);
Guadeloupe: 2 total removals (1 criminal and 1 non-criminal);
Montserrat: 2 total removals (2 criminal and 0 non-criminal);
Netherlands Antilles, inclusive of St. Maarten, Curacao, Saba, Bonaire: 2 total removals (1 criminal and 1 non-criminal);
Anguilla: 1 total removal (0 criminal and 1 non-criminal);
Cayman Islands: 1 total removals (1 criminal and 0 non-criminal);
Aruba: 0 total removal;
For Latin America, Mexico topped the list with 289,686 total removals including174,003 criminal and 115,683 non-criminals while Guatemala was second with 40,498 total removals (14,251 criminal and 26,247 non-criminal).
Other country rates were as follows:
Honduras: 32,464 total removals (14,180 criminal and 18,284 non-criminal);
El Salvador: 19,694 total removals (9,095 criminal and 10,599 non-criminal);
Brazil: 2,804 total removals (509 criminal and 2,295 non-criminal);
Ecuador: 1,976 total removals (819 criminal and 1,157 non-criminal);
Colombia: 1,681 total removals (1,121 criminal and 560 non-criminal);
Nicaragua: 1,507 total removals (777 criminal and 730 non-criminal);
Costa Rica: 380 total removals (152 criminal and 228 non-criminal);
Venezuela: 284 total removals (131 criminal and 153 non-criminal);
Argentina: 226 total removals (119 criminal and 107 non-criminal);
Bolivia: 197 total removals (131 criminal and 66 non-criminal);
Panama: 137 total removals (100 criminal and 37 non-criminal);
Uruguay: 119 total removals (63 criminal and 56 non-criminal)
Chile: 115 total removals (74 criminal and 41 non-criminal);
Peru: 908 total removals (504 criminal and 404 non-criminal);
Paraguay: 18 total removals (10 criminal and 8 non-criminal).

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they deported 409,849 immigrants who broke criminal laws, were threats to national security and were recent border crossers and repeat violators of immigration law, around the globe in 2012.

Of the total number removed, approximately 55 percent, or 225,390 were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors – almost double the removal of criminals in FY 2008. This includes 1,215 immigrants convicted of homicide; 5,557 immigrants convicted of sexual offenses; 40,448 immigrants convicted for crimes involving drugs; and 36,166 aliens convicted for driving under the influence.

ICE said it continues to make progress with regard to other categories prioritized for removal. Some 96 percent of all ICE’s removals fell into a priority category – a record high.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director, John Morton, said the administration’s focus remains on removing from the country convicted criminals and other individuals that fall into priority areas for enforcement.

“Smart and effective immigration enforcement relies on setting priorities for removal and executing on those priorities,” said Director Morton. “In order to further enhance our ability to focus enforcement efforts on serious offenders, we are changing who ICE will issue detainers against. While the FY 2012 removals indicate that we continue to make progress in focusing resources on criminal and priority aliens, with more convicted criminals being removed from the country than ever before, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we are doing everything we can to utilize our resources in a way that maximizes public safety.”

News Americas, LONDON, England, Mon. Dec. 3, 2012: On December 4th and 5th, the Premiers and Chief Ministers of the UK’s Overseas Territories will gather in London for their annual Joint Ministerial Council with the British government.

The meeting will begin by focusing on the UK’s White Paper published in June; consider the UK’s priorities, then move on to issues such as relations with the UK parliament and self-determination. Participants will also discuss issues such as investment promotion, relations with the Commonwealth and the role of national security councils.

True to his word, the British Foreign Secretary will bring ministers from every relevant British Government department to spell out how they and their officials will work to support the overseas territories in the areas of education, governance, justice, health care and the environment. They will also meet the Prime Minister, confirming a new found centrality that overseas territories have in the UK’s thinking.

Despite this, some of the Caribbean Overseas Territories governments will have other concerns on their minds that may emerge in their bilateral meetings.

In the last few days, articles have appeared in the UK media that suggest a growing climate of hostility towards the offshore financial services that the UK’s Caribbean Overseas Territories provide.

Unfortunately, the issue is surrounded by confusion as much of the media are prone to wrongly conflate the very varied offshore, financial, registry and other services offered by Overseas Territories into an all-embracing story of illegality, greed and tax evasion.

The newspaper campaign began a week or so ago with a report that the British Treasury has in draft form an agreement that will require all offshore centres over which it has jurisdiction to disclose from January 1, 2014 on, the beneficial owners of all accounts held by UK taxpayers including those hidden by trusts or companies.

To achieve this, the British Government was reported to be threatening to prevent Crown Dependencies (the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Guernsey) and, it was suggested, the Overseas Territories, from agreeing to meet the terms of the US Foreign Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) unless they agree to a similar information-sharing agreement with the UK.

The US FATCA, which comes into force on January 1, 2014, requires foreign banks to provide full details of all US citizens holding accounts outside of the US to the US Internal Revenue Service. Without doing so their US banking operations could not continue.

The original story emerged through a leak to the magazine, the International Tax Review, which suggested the UK government is drawing up plans to impose its own version of the US Foreign Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) on its Crown Dependencies, and possibly thereafter on its Overseas Territories.

What, however, is still far from clear is how these reported developments might relate to existing provisions.

The Caribbean Overseas Territories are already subject to the EU Savings Tax Directive. This requires that the number of accounts that EU citizens have with financial institutions and their aggregate savings income are automatically reported to tax authorities in Europe and to the European Commission.

The reports about the new disclosure proposals coincide with publication of previously confidential names of the beneficial UK owners of a number of British Virgin Island offshore companies by the Guardian newspaper in Britain and a left leaning US-based body, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, (ICIJ).

The stories also appear just as draft documents are emerging from the European Commission that make far reaching recommendations on co-ordinating tax policy towards third countries, seek to develop an EU wide approach to aggressive tax planning and outline a draft policy relating to tax fraud and tax evasion.

These are difficult issues as they divide the ways in which the Caribbean Overseas Territories and the British and other developed nation Governments, see the world.

Viewed through the eyes of the taxpayer and governments trying to increase their tax take, greater regulation to the point of ending offshore secrecy in nations over which they have jurisdiction, may seem reasonable, even just. It is, they argue, in line with popular sentiment that believes that at times of hardship, tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning is both immoral and unfair.

However, the same issue when seen though the eyes of the governments of Caribbean Overseas Territories is very different. They have carefully crafted, with the British government’s agreement, legally sound and responsible tax and financial service environments, and have made their micro states among some of the most successful in the world. For them any sudden change in policy will appear to be unjust, destructive and likely to reverse a long period of economic growth that has enabled them to become self-governing and advanced nations.

What the recent flood of hostile coverage signals is a significant change in public and Government opinion in Britain, the implications of which the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the British Virgin Islands need to be aware of.

This is because it carries with it the real possibility, going forward, that all political parties in the UK will see electoral value in establishing greater control and oversight so as to ensure the greatest possible tax revenue and to meet the demands of public opinion.

Already, senior UK politicians, such as the UK’s Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, sensing political advantage, are beginning to suggest that financial services arrangements in both the UK Crown dependencies and the overseas territories may have to change.

If this is the intention, then a debate is required now about how these small Caribbean nations, that have achieved real success in tourism and financial services, are in future to maintain their economic viability and their financial independence from London.

David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at david.jessop@caribbean-council.org. Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org.