Guyana means business

• Author: Luxner, Larry

In one of South America's fastest-growing economies, calypso and reggae are vastly more popular than salsa, nearly everyone speaks English and the national sport isn't soccer - but cricket.

Welcome to Guyana, a sparsely populated nation of 750,000, whose gross domestic product shot up 6-7 percent last year. That growth, topped in the region only by Chile and Peru, was fueled in part by large foreign investment in mining, timber, and agriculture. Even a massive cyanide spill at the huge Omai gold mine south of Georgetown, the capital, could not derail the country's economic boom.

"Guyana is on the brink of becoming the most dynamic emerging market in the Western Hemisphere," says Colin Vickerie, chief executive officer of Carivest Distributors, in East Brunswick, New Jersey. "Its economy has made a 180-degree turnaround since 1992. A new free-market philosophy, the elimination of price controls, the liberalization of interest rates, and an exchange rate based on market forces have all been essential to this turnaround."

Vickerie and his three Guyanese-born business partners - Osmond Adams, Samuel Johnson, and Winston G. Saunders - believe their native land offers potential investors an excellent return on their money and recently launched a three-nation road show to prove it.

Carivest's goal: to raise US$100 million through the Guyana Liberalization Fund, which seeks to collect money from ethnic Guyanese in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain and invest it in promising enterprises throughout the nation. Those enterprises include everything from garment factories and power plants to highways, pineapple-canning facilities, and shopping malls.

"Our marketing strategy is to attract as many investors as we can," says Vickerie, formerly vice president of the investment manager services division of the United States Trust Company of New York.

Carivest recently registered the fund in the Cayman Islands. The minimum investment is US$3,000. During the first year, participation will be limited; thereafter, it will open quarterly.

Under laws established by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Carivest may not market the fund publicly in the United States or sign up more than ninety-nine U.S. investors. Therefore, Carivest officials are careful to gear their seminars to the Guyanese diaspora, which includes an estimated 250,000 Guyanese nationals living...