Diageo’s Captain Morgan Rum’s distillery in the U.S. Virgin Islands is finally scheduled to produce rum by the end of the year. Diageo, the parent company of Captain Morgan Rum, and a United Kingdom-based company that is the largest distilled spirits maker in the world, expects the construction of their new St. Croix location to be completed by October and have rum in the aging barrels by December. This week’s simple announcement is packed with controversy that has been boiling for over a year. The rest of the complicated “story” is worth the read.
For many years, a third party distiller in Puerto Rico has been producing Captain Morgan Rum and selling it to Seagram’s. Diageo bought the Captain Morgan Rum label in 2001 inheriting this third party manufacturing agreement. They have looking for years how to arrange a way for them to produce their own rum under the Captain Morgan Rum label. With the manufacturing plant now being built for Diageo to produce the rum themselves, Puerto Rico will be losing millions of dollars that were coming to their territory from the rum excise tax. Since they will not be getting any of these taxes, they are protesting to the Congress that the U.S. Virgin Islands should not get any of them either, because the USVI is going to use these taxes in order to finance the construction of the new distillery on St. Croix. Read the rest of this entry »
The Port-au-Prince area of Haiti, is located about 500 miles to the west of Red Hook, St. Thomas where Caribbean Islands Realty is headquartered. Tuesday it was hit with a devastating 7.3-magnitude earthquake that has caused much of this city of millions to collapse. The tide of human suffering is beyond any thing we can imagine. Gov. John deJongh Jr. said in a news release Tuesday that the prayers of the people of the Virgin Islands are with the residents of Haiti, and that help is on the way from every Caribbean nation, plus the world. “Eyewitness accounts of the quake indicate a catastrophic situation,” deJongh said, adding that many Virgin Islanders have both family and friends in Haiti who are tonight anxiously awaiting word about the fate of their loved ones. Read the rest of this entry »