Businesses get their own tribunal for commercial disputes
Published:Wednesday | December 15, 2010 | 12:00 AM
A dedicated body for settling of commercial disputes will begin operating here in January, as businesses seek less costly and more time sensitive avenues to solve trade squabbles.
The centre, which is a project of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), will have a test phase of 18 months, after which its operations will be passed to a locally registered company to be run as a commercial venture.
The project to establish the Commercial Alternative Dispute Resolution Centre (CARDC) will also include a review of current legislation.
"It is good time that the current 110-year-old Arbitration Act be revised and updated and we thank the USAID for providing the funding to undertake that particular task within the project," said PSOJ President Joseph M Matalon at Monday's launch of the centre.
"We also have the commitment of the Ministry of Justice to make this legislation a priority and to give it smooth passage through the legislative process," he said.
CARDC's services will be targeted at SMEs, which make up 60 per cent of PSOJ's membership, but large organisations won't be denied access, says the trade body's chief executive officer Sandra Glasgow.
A cost is appended to the services, but under the test phase, SMEs arguing before the centre's panel of mediators and arbitrators, will each get a subsidy of US$1,000 to air their case.
The full suite of charges and the expertise to be made available were not fully disclosed at announcement of the project.
The CARDC's US$309,067 start-up is being seeded by a US$150,000 IDB grant and another US$159,067 of funds from PSOJ, JCC and USAID.
Pan Jamaican Investment Trust is sponsoring office space for CARDC, which will operate rent free for five years from the Tourism Building at 64 Knutsford Boulevard in New Kingston.
The centre is being established as an alternative to the court system where commercial cases tend to take six years or more to go to trial, and lawyer's fees run into millions of dollars.
PSOJ president Joseph Matalon said a demand survey found that 74.2 per cent of the businesses sampled "expressed a willingness to use the services that the centre would provide".
The survey, Glasgow said later, was among 60 JCC and PSOJ members.
Matalon said the centre would provide a total administrative package for commercial, mediation and arbitration services to the target market of small and medium size enterprises in the first year.
The centre breaks new ground as a body dedicated to mediating business quarrels, but the service is already offered, in a minor fashion, by the Disputes Resolution Foundation, which handles cases referred by the courts.
Matalon said the company that will eventually take over the running of the centre, 18 months from its January start-up, will be called Jamaica Institute of Arbitrators Limited.
The PSOJ will have 70 per cent shares in JIAL and JCC the other 30 per cent, Glasgow said.