The Tribune

THE Free National Movement is going to win nearly all the Family Island seats and the vast majority of the seats in New Providence, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham told a mass rally of FNM supporters at RM Bailey Park last night.

“We are very near now to putting South Andros and Mangrove Cay in the bag. The FNM tide in the Family Islands is unstoppable,” he added.

And with just three days left before the 2012 General Elections, Mr Ingraham urged Bahamians to conduct themselves with higher standards and called for “no violence.”

Responding to the spitting incident involving Bernadette Christie, wife of PLP leader Perry Christie, he said: “Not a bloody soul spit on his wife. They did call him a name and they shouldn’t have done that but they didn’t spit on her.”

Mr Ingraham said that when Perry Christie was the prime minister, “he was scared to lead and refused to act”. He added: “What has he done now for you to hire him again? They (the PLP) are the party of big talk and no action.

The Prime Minister, in response to PLP claims of scandal, said Christie “really should be careful using the word scandal. It’ll backfire so fast it will make their heads spin”.

• The FNM yesterday hit out at the PLP’s claims on privatisation, saying they do not square up to the opposition party’s record.

Before taking power in 2002, the PLP promised to privatise BTC and the Water and Sewerage Corporation in a manner that was in the best interest of the Bahamian people, using a transparent bidding process. But, the FNM says, the opposition proved they are “strangers to transparency and ethics” when they actually tried to privatise the two public entities.

Now, the PLP has promised to review the Cable and Wireless contract and sell shares of BTC to Bahamians.

In response, the FNM said: “Do they think that Bahamians have forgotten the ill-fated secret attempt to sell BTC to Bluewater Ventures before the 2007 election?

“At the height of the company’s value in 2003, the PLP did not want to privatise BTC because it could jeopardise votes. Upon realising that the company had to be sold, rather than following a transparent bidding process, the PLP’s ‘government-appointed committee’ locked out other bidders and pursued Bluewater, a privately held entity which did not have any audited statements or publicly disclosed financial statements.

“Alarmingly, the privatisation committee under the Christie administration recommended to the government that negotiations should proceed with Bluewater although the company ‘wasn’t even traded on the stock market ... and had no experience in telecommunications’.”

The attempts to sell WSC followed the same pattern, the governing party charged.

The PLP attempted to engage in a “backdoor deal” that would see the company sold to one of its own senior members, who was a government official at the time.

Again, the company in question had no track record in the Bahamas or internationally and would have overcharged Bahamian taxpayers by $4 to $5 million, the FNM said.