Digicel chief says cellphone company is struggling in Haiti but not suffering like population
PORT-AU-PRINCE
The armored SUV makes its way up Avenue John Paul II in Haiti’s teeming capital when Denis O’Brien, the Irish billionaire who built the largest cellphone company here and controls the lion’s share of the Caribbean mobile phone market, leans forward and peers out of the passenger side rear window.
“Everybody is working. All of these people have small stalls,” he says, as vehicles slow to a crawl, whizzing motorcycles cut through traffic and he turns his attention to the myriad of sidewalk vendors off to the side.
“Look at this woman here with the basket on her head, trying to eke out a living,” O’Brien says. “How hard is that? What sort of work is that to do every day, to fund your family? She might be making a couple of dollars a day too and then you have food inflation and you have people who are probably trying to steal from her. Her own safety, going home wherever she lives.”
Haiti’s largest foreign investor, O’Brien controls 70% of the cellphone market here through his privately held company Digicel Group, which is headquartered in nearby Jamaica. With more than 13.2 million mobile subscribers across 25 markets, mostly in the Caribbean, the company not only revolutionized the mobile-wireless market in Haiti and elsewhere by making devices accessible to everyone, but also the business landscape. Its billboards, “Entrepreneur of the Year” competition and school construction program all challenged the status quo in a country where the private sector usually consists of a few monopolistic Haitian elites, and the company introduced concepts such as marketing and social responsibility.
But after years of riding a wave of chronic political instability, O’Brien, 64, is finding that he can no longer depend on Haiti, his largest market, to generate the kind of revenues that once helped place him on Forbes’ billionaire’s list. Surging gang violence and kidnappings, skyrocketing inflation and a worsening economy have started to take a toll.
In Haiti, the company’s profits are down by more than half; the local currency, the gourde, has depreciated by more than 50%, and rising energy costs for Digicel’s networks across markets, along with its double-digit interest rates, have made servicing its debt near impossible.
“We’re struggling but by God, we’re not suffering like the population,” O’Brien says. “There’s no comparison.”
O’Brien, a towering, silverhaired tycoon who had several businesses before Digicel, has been his company’s main shareholder since putting up its first cell towers in Jamaica in 2001. Now, he may soon
Dozens of advocates for patients and consumers, citing widespread harm caused by medical debt, are pushing the Biden administration to take more aggressive steps to protect Americans from medical bills and debt collectors.
In letters to the IRS and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the groups call for new federal rules that among other things would prohibit debt for medically necessary care from appearing on consumer credit reports.
Advocates also want the federal government to bar nonprofit hospitals from selling patient debt or denying medical care to people with past-due bills, practices that remain widespread across the U.S., Kaiser Health News found.
And the groups are pressing the IRS to crack down on nonprofit hospital systems that withhold financial assistance from low-income patients or make aid cumbersome to get, another common obstacle KHN documented.
“Every day, people are having to make choices about housing and clothing and food because of medical debt,” said Emily Stewart, executive director of Community Catalyst, a Boston nonprofit leading the effort. “It’s really urgent the Biden administration take action to put protections in place.”
Among the more than 50 groups supporting the initiative are national advocates such as the National Consumer Law Center, the Arthritis Foundation and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Nationwide, 100 million people have health care debt, according to a KHNNPR investigation.
While some of the debt appears on credit reports, much of it is hidden elsewhere as credit card balances, loans from relatives or payment plans to hospitals and medical providers.
Last spring, the White House directed federal agencies to work on relieving medical debts for veterans and to stop considering medical debt in evaluating eligibility for some federally backed mortgages.
California, Colorado, Maryland, New York and other states have enacted new laws to expand consumer protections and require hospitals within their bor
‘‘ EVERYTHING IN HAITI CAN BE ACTUALLY SOLVED IF PEOPLE TALK. THE DIFFICULTY THEN, IF YOU ROLL THAT FORWARD, IS THE INSECURITY AND THE VIOLENCE. Denis O’Brien, chairman, Digicel Group board of directors