Consortium of 5 groups to operate airport

Details are emerging on the new private management contract soon to be awarded for the operation of the Philip Goldson International Airport. In a telephone interview with management team executives Enrique Hoare and Linsford Rosado, News 5 has learned that the new owners of a thirty-year concession to manage the airport are a consortium of five investment groups. One is European, the other from the U.S.A., and the remaining three are Belizean. Hoare and Rosado declined to identify the parties on the ground that the final agreements and financial commitments have not yet been made. That investment consortium–which should be in place by the end of the year–will in turn hire a local company to actually run the P.G.I.A.. Those names are familiar, comprising nine experienced Belizeans who have been managing the airport very capably for a number of years. At the core of the group, in addition to Hoare and Rosado, is the Airports Authority’s present Chief Executive Officer, Pablo Espat. The managers and entire airport staff will work under an incentive system that awards them extra pay based on the success of the airport’s operations.

Those operations will be enhanced by an expansion of the runaway, terminal, parking, and emergency equipment, all of which should be completed by April of 2005, at an estimated cost of forty million Belize dollars. The runway extension, while not allowing for Boeing 747 Jumbo aircraft, will easily handle non-stop flights from Europe and North America using the increasingly popular Boeing 767-300 and Airbus 320 models.

While all indications are favourable for a steady increase in revenues at the airport, the executives told News 5 that they have not based their projections only on an optimistic scenario. They pointed out that even following the terrorist acts of September eleventh, 2001, Belize’s tourism and travel industry rebounded quickly and in fact underwent its greatest expansion with the entry of new airlines and additional routes for existing carriers.

Whatever happens in the future, the new concessionaires will be fully responsible for the airport’s existing debt of thirty million Belize dollars plus whatever they’ll need to borrow for the upcoming expansion. At the same time, the Government of Belize will be off the financial hook, and according to Rosado and Hoare, will no longer even be guaranteeing any of the airport’s loans.

Pending the identification of the principals, we extend our best wishes to the new operators on what seems like a common sense approach to privatisation.