Sogebank - Haiti Observer Blog

Consul General of the United States Embassy, Jay Thomas Smith, held a media conference at the American Embassy to discuss the processing of temporary visas. It seems a number of travel agencies wanting to jump to the head of the line to get temporary visas are running a scam, which is increasing the wait time for general applicants to receive their visas.

Travel agencies are using made-up numbers, which the U.S. Embassy does not question, in order to save chunks of appointment times for their employees. As a result of snatching appointment times away from general applicants, wait times have increased through no fault of their own or the U.S. Embassy's.

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Pierre-Marie Boisson, on April 16th, 2013, happily announced the merger of Hotel Villa Creole and Hotel El Rancho. Together, these two hotels have a real estate property of 5 acres of land. Boisson mentioned that in Petion-Ville's living memory, this merger represents the largest transaction in real estate. Boisson is the financial adviser of Sogebank. Sogebank in turn is the adviser of real estate and financial company, FIS.

With this merger of El Rancho and Villa Creole, the shareholders of Villa Creole become El Rancho's shareholders. Of the total of 140 shareholders, the majority of the shares are held by Reginald Boulos followed by descendants of Sogebank, Silvera and bank employees. The renovation work for El Rancho is projected for completion by 2013 end of summer. El Rancho will have 13 apartments and 73 rooms and will have 86 housing units. Villa Creole will add another 40 rooms to this and will also go through some renovation work because of the damages caused by earthquake of 2013. During the Phase 2 of development, El Rancho will have another 50 rooms.

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U.S. Agency for International Department (USAID) started a program that aimed towards boosting up the economy of Haiti through targeted loans to Haitian business units. It has been found in an audit that program failed as the intended targets did not receive the loans, workers were not trained properly and there was no systematic record maintenance. The Office of Inspector General of USAID released the audit report towards the end of February. The aim of this audit was to find out whether areas like waste management, handicrafts, tourism, construction and agriculture were benefited through the promotion of lending practices.

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