Businessman Denis O’Brien has urged companies attending the Davos economic summit in Switzerland to invest in Haiti to help the country recover after the devastating earthquake.
Sharing a stage at the summit with former US president Bill Clinton and the Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim today, Mr O’Brien told executives there was “enormous opportunity” for companies to make money on investments in Caribbean country.
It is “a low cost country on the doorstep of the greatest market in the world – the United States,” he said.
“Haiti is not boring – it is a challenge,” he said. He told delegates his mobile phone operator, Digicel, one of the largest private companies in the Caribbean island country, has invested $370 million since it started its business there five years ago.
Haiti had 10 million consumers and was a good place to “blood” management teams, said Mr O’Brien.
Mr Clinton agreed with Mr O’Brien, saying that Haiti wasn’t boring and “neither was it hopeless”.
Mr O’Brien, a veteran of Davos who was originally not scheduled to attend the summit, flew into Switzerland to press global companies for foreign direct investment for the ravaged country.
He told The Irish Times today the Haiti crisis was "the first humanitarian disaster of this scale" as it had killed as many as 200,000 people in an urban setting.
At a debate yesterday, Mr O’Brien criticised the European Union for its “paltry” response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti in an impassioned plea for more emergency aid. Mr O’Brien said he was concerned about "uncalled for" criticism of the relief efforts on the ground.
He described the comments by French minister Alain Joyandet last week as “totally out of order.” Mr Joyandet called on the United Nations to investigate and clarify the role of the US military in the Haiti relief effort, saying: “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”
“The last thing we need is for people to be so critical when people are working so hard on the ground,” said Mr O’Brien, who described the US and EU efforts as “a massive struggle”.
“The European Union’s response has been paltry – I am from Ireland and very much a European so something needs to be done,” he said.
Irregular food distribution on the island was creating tensions, he said, which was leading to security problems. “If this was in Ireland, we would be rioting,” said Mr O’Brien.
A shortage of cash has led to runs on the banks and the Haitian government was relying on credit from the International Monetary Fund to pay civil servants, he said.
Haiti's government was unable to function as the justice, interior, tax and foreign affairs ministries were destroyed in the January 12th earthquake, he said, and the country needed emergency funding to fund the Haitian government and re-train civil servants.
About 500,000 children are not going to school, said Mr O’Brien, and that it would cost $130,000 to buy a tent, not including a floor, which could accommodate 12 to 13 classrooms to replace schools.
“Instead of criticising, people should actually come forward and that is why the European Union and all the members need to say, ‘We will take this one thing to do.’”
Tom Arnold, chief executive of Concern, told the Davos meeting that getting water into place and distributing food, which would probably involve the military, was a major priority.
“There is still not enough people getting food – there are scarcities there and there are tensions rising,” he said.
Mr O’Brien said that some of his 900 staff at Digicel were afraid to go above the second floor of the company’s 11-storey building, fearing further aftershocks. One member of his staff arrived at work after burying five members of his family, he said, and some 300 staff have lost their homes.
