Last week, the president of the L. Leon Jimenes Group, Jose Leon, said that the group would let the Dominican people know what should be expected from the government.
Today, all the daily papers carry a full-page announcement by Grupo Leon Jimenes detailing their vision for a better Dominican Republic.
Basically the document compiles most of the positions taken by the country’s leading industrial and business groups. By saying that the group is trying to avoid discussions that generate stopgap measures, the statement focuses on four basic considerations: the organization, conduct, administration and management that the government administration should follow in the handling of the nation’s economy in order to achieve sustained growth and better results for everyone.
Because of the importance of the issues at hand, the group rejects a tax reform that is improvised for current problems and insists on talking about themes that have been ignored and are not unavoidable if the country wants to compete in the global market. These issues include: organizing the government, looking after expenditures, strengthening the legal system, establishing priorities in order to look after health, education and welfare, the restructuring and modernizing of the electric system and the activation of the nation’s economy.
The statement lists the steps to be taken on each of these agendas and ends by saying that these measures would fulfill the expectations of the industrialists and the civilian population in general, and put an end to the improvisation that is currently the practice.
Clave Digital reports that E Leon Jimenes, a business holding that is responsible for 8% of government tax collections, is yet to present for open debate the proposals for integral tax reform prepared for the group by Carlos Asilis, the leading Dominican financial consultant who is a former chief strategy director for global investment for JP Morgan Chase.