Building a dock to berth cruise ships - Back to square one

[drew sailbum]

Here is your not entirely unexpected update on the drawn out saga of building a dock for berthing cruise ships.

 

My previous update mentioned negotiations with a company, China Harbour Engineering Company. That deal is dead.

 

CHEC was selected in a controversial manner. The United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office has made it clear that the process of selection was unacceptable as it bypassed some of the normal tendering process required for large projects. The Premier of the Cayman Islands, at the instruction of the UK FCO, has terminated negotiations with CHEC.

That leaves us back where we began... at square one.

 

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

[drew sailbum]

Just an update,

 

The above mentioned Premier was arrested on several charges. He has denied wrongdoing. He was subsequently removed from office in a vote of no confidence. A reconstituted government is in place and the next election is in May 2013.

 

The cruise dock project is still important for the island and will doubtlessly be taken up by government again in the near future. All the politicians seem to agree that this needs to be done but cannot seem to agree on exactly how to make that happen. :o

 

After the election the project will probably move forward again for another round of tendering. Hopefully tendering will move through to completion and construction will begin during the upcoming administration, regardless of who wields power.

 

That moves my best guess on the timeframe to a possible 2014 start of construction. It might be ready for use late 2014 or sometime in 2015.

[runner15km]

Thanks for the update. :)

[Extraordinaire]

This is very interesting as we have had to miss this port before due to whether and I was also told by a taxi driver one evening while I was awaiting our ship with my 2 youngish sons in Grand Cayman (due to bad weather up here in the Great White North" our flight had been cancelled and we missed the ship initially) that sometimes due to weather the ships cannot come in and hadn't been coming in the past few days. "What"?!? was all I could think of. Anyway, our ship did come in...:D