CAP CANA, Dominican Republic. - The tourism-real estate company Cap Cana Monday announced that its offer to exchange its bonds issued to reconstruct the US$250 million in bonds originally issued in 2006, with a final maturity in 2013, has so far been welcomed favorably by more than 95% of the bonds in effect.

Cana president Ricardo Hazoury said numerous institutional investors from Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean took part in the bond exchange, and the transaction will be formalized at the end of this week.

“The unprecedented stock-exchange and financial instability which worsened after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September last year, closed the international credit market for the large Latin American issuers, such as Cap Cana. This successful new bonds offer in exchange for the bonds we had issued in 2006 generally marks the start of the unfreezing of the market for the Latin American region,” Hazoury said.

In that regard, Cap Cana’s Board of Directors executive vice-president George Spence, said his company understood from the start of the crisis in the international financial markets, that the most important goal was no only to be the region’s first company to publicly confront the effects of the crisis, but also adopt a clear strategy to maximize the company’s viability for all parties with interests in the project, and with it resurge totally rebuilt from the crisis.”

He said the next step in their plan to make significant cuts in expenses and operative and administrative commitments began in October, and then followed by totally settling their US$100 million debt with international banks at yearend 2008.

“At the start of 2009 we began the reconstruction process of our US$250 million in international bonds, by means of this transaction we managed to reduce the debt by more than US$50 million, and to extend the repayment terms for the remaining capital from the 2010-2013 period to the 2014-2016 period, simultaneously reducing the obligation of interests payment during the next five years, to little more than the third part of which was this commitment before this reconstruction,” Spence said.

“As a whole, this reconstruction is among biggest and most complex ever carried out in the Dominican Republic.”

Hazoury stressed that each visitor who comes to Cap Cana can state that his project has currently reached maturity and an advanced stage of development, “which is visible in the reality of its ample service infrastructure, such as avenues, electrical energy generation  , aqueduct, telecommunications, golf courses, hotels and marina, besides the Cap Cana Heritage School, that began operations more  than a year ago, and the upcoming opening of the campus of the Unibe University. We also have build and handed over hundreds of apartments and villas.”