Fortis Receives 33.3% Shareholdings in B.E.L.

Dean Barrow

The Prime Minister says he is confident that the new and improved relationship will work out, and if it doesn’t, there is a clause which allows Fortis to sell its shares back to G.O.B. in four years. G.O.B. and the Social Security Board will also control the Board of Directors through its majority of nine directors, while Fortis will be represented by three directors including Lynn Young, the former C.E.O. of B.E.L. and businesswoman, Kay Menzies. Where the day to day management of the utility is concerned – the PM says that will remain just the way it is with Jeffrey Locke as C.E.O. and Rodwell Williams as Chair of the Board.  During the acquisition, Fortis had lashed out at the Public Utilities Commission as orchestrating the downfall of B.E.L., but in this new atmosphere of goodwill and bonhomie, that’s all a thing of the past. 

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“Mr. Perry and the people at Fortis are of course brilliant businesspersons and they would no doubt have done their homework in terms of B.E.L. and would have recognized that profits have surged from three point one million at year’s end 2011 to thirty-six point two million, the highest ever, at year end 2014. This is even as the PUC mandated a fall in electricity rates from forty-four point one cents per kilowatt hour in 2011 to thirty-five cents in 2015 – a twenty percent drop. The point I’m making is that even with the PUC’s regulatory role, this company has made tremendous progress under the stewardship of the current Board and the current C.E.O. Mr. Perry can speak for himself, but we don’t expect that Fortis’ membership on the Board and it’s thirty-three and a third percent shareholding will in any way interfere with – retard – this magnificent trajectory that we have seen from B.E.L.  Indeed we expect that Fortis’ expertise and the brainpower and experience it will bring via its Directors to the Board will cause B.E.L. to go from strength to strength notwithstanding the PUC’s regulatory role.”