Weekly Report - 10 February 2011 (WR-11-06)

NICARAGUA | FDI. The government of President Daniel Ortega has announced that it expects to attract US$1.0bn in foreign direct investment (FDI) for 2011, a 107% increase on the US$500m received in 2010 (which in turn represented a 15.1% increase on 2009). The government said that of this, US$362m will go on hydrocarbons, (mainly through the “mega-refinery" "El Supremo Sueño de Bolí­var", which is being built on in Miramar, on the Pacific coast with funds from Venezuela's regional initiative, Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Alba)). The next most important sector is telecommunications (US$350m) followed by free zones (US$170m); tourism (US$70m); ports (US$40m); fishing (US$22m). According to the government, this will create a total of 107,424 new jobs, 24,317 directly and the rest indirectly.
According to the government, Alba funds, which Ortega has long refused to include in the budget, represent a sizeable chunk of FDI for 2011 accounting for US$396.5m (or 38% of investment projected for the year). Most of this will go on the new Miramar refinery although US$22.5m of Alba funds have been earmarked for the construction of a new port in Bilwi, in the North Atlantic Autonomous region (Raan) on the Caribbean Coast; US$18m for the fishing sector and US$6m for forestry.  Other big (non Alba) investments include the construction of the US$1.1bn Tumarí­n dam on Rí­o Grande, in the central Matagalpa region by Brazil's Queiroz Galvão - the country's largest hydroelectric project, with an eventual capacity of 220MW.

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