Mohammed Patel elected as 2010 - 2011 BIBA President
Thursday July 15 2010 | 06:46 PM

Promoting Barbados’s membership of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will be one of the top priorities of Mohammed Patel, the new president of the Barbados International Business Association (BIBA), during his term.

While acknowledging that FATF membership process can take anywhere from two to three years to complete, Patel said that he was committed to BIBA working with the Central Bank of Barbados and other relevant Government departments to move the process substantially forward.

While Barbados is a member of the Caribbean Action Task Force, some financial experts have raised the concern that Barbados could be losing out on business from international institutions prohibited, for compliance reasons, from conducting business in countries that were not members of FATF.  

Patel, who is the Managing Director of Cidel Bank & Trust Inc, said that his time in office would also be focused on continuing to promote the importance of the international business sector to the people and the economy of Barbados. The chief medium for communicating this, he said, would be the second annual International Business Week, which will be launched later this year.

He added that BIBA’s message of the importance of the sector was bolstered by the work of its Economic Contributions Committee, which was geared toward measuring and recording in concrete terms the sector’s economic impact.

Patel reflected that BIBA had come a long way in recent years, yet he and the new board of directors recognised that there were still pressing issues that require BIBA’s focused attention, including assisting Government in strategising on how to remain competitive, whether in the area of tax negotiations or continuing to streamline business facilitation; actively engaging in the development of the new legislation affecting the sector such as the Financial Services Bill and the International Corporate and Trust Service Providers Bill; or developing new initiatives to promote BIBA and Barbados in international target markets.

A chartered certified accountant and trust and estate practitioner, Patel has a strong background in both the international finance and hospitality industries having previously served as the Managing Director of Citation Bank International Inc. (Barbados); Director of Finance for the Pemberton Group, an international hotel and real estate group; and Director of Finance of the Royal Westmoreland Group of Companies.