Nadaleen Singh

The Massy Group has in­creased its foot­print in Colom­bia through the ac­qui­si­tion of Massy En­er­gy Colom­bia. The group's chair­man Robert Bermudez made the an­nounce­ment on Thurs­day dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the VI­II Amer­i­c­as Com­pet­i­tive Fo­rum where he spoke on the top­ic Col­lab­o­ra­tion as a strat­e­gy for the Massy Group–What does it mean?"

Bermudez said now that com­pa­nies with­in the group are iden­ti­fied by one brand, there can be more col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween them so that cus­tomers can be bet­ter served.

Out­lin­ing fu­ture plans for the group, he said: "We are now grow­ing our hori­zons to in­clude Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca. We have made three in­vest­ments in the re­cent past, the most re­cent was an­nounced to­day (Thurs­day), where we ac­quired Wood Group PSN Colom­bia and we wel­come 1200 new col­lab­o­ra­tors to the Massy fam­i­ly un­der the ban­ner Massy En­er­gy Colom­bia. This will al­low us to lever­age our en­er­gy ecosys­tem in­to Colom­bia."

In news­pa­per ad­ver­tise­ments pub­lished this week, Massy Group said the new­ly ac­quired com­pa­ny pro­vides pro­duc­tion, main­te­nance and en­gi­neer­ing ser­vices to clients in the oil and gas and min­ing sec­tors in Colom­bia.It added: "Wood Group is the largest en­er­gy ser­vices com­pa­ny world­wide, em­ploy­ing about 40,000 em­ploy­ees across the globe and op­er­at­ing in more than 50 coun­tries. Wood Group is Massy's 50 per cent joint ven­ture part­ner in Massy Wood Group which op­er­ates in T&T."

Speak­ing at the com­pet­i­tive­ness and in­no­va­tion lun­cheon on day two of the ACF at the Port-of-Spain wa­ter­front, Bermudez said the Massy Group has al­so made a "mi­nor­i­ty" in­vest­ment in a Cos­ta Ri­ca tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny which has op­er­a­tions in Colom­bia through­out Cen­tral Amer­i­ca.

He added: "We have ac­quired a car deal­er­ship in Bo­go­ta and Cali, where we have a joint ven­ture part­ner in the De Li­ma Group. We see our fu­ture to the west of us, and we are cau­tious­ly in­vest­ing in or­der to gain ex­pe­ri­ence and to de­vel­op re­la­tion­ships with peo­ple in Latin Amer­i­ca."Bermudez called for col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tors "to de­liv­er ser­vices to the coun­try that are des­per­ate­ly need­ed."

"We have very good macro-eco­nom­ics, the Gov­ern­ment spends a huge amount of mon­ey on ed­u­ca­tion, on health, on so­cial ser­vices, yet we have a group of peo­ple in this so­ci­ety who are falling out, falling through the cracks and it's lead­ing to a very high un­ex­plained lev­el of crime in a coun­try that is pros­per­ous."He called on Gov­ern­ment to fa­cil­i­tate co-op­er­a­tion with vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors so that the crime prob­lem of crime could be un­der­stood.