country of St. Lucia when the company's contract expires on March 31.

The company's office in Bermuda issued a statement which explained: "Cable & Wireless is disappointed that its best efforts to resolve the issues in St.

Lucia through negotiation have proved unsuccessful.'' And the Caribbean news agency, CANA has reported that recent talks between Cable & Wireless and member states of the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL), ended without any headway being made on outstanding issues.

Cable and Wireless said they were committed to the liberalisation of telecommunications in the Caribbean, but said that this should take place in a fair and orderly manner in order to ensure sustainable competition.

To achieve this, the company said it was essential to have well-structured legislation, effective regulation and an independent regulator, and Cable & Wireless said they were committed to working toward this objective.

Cable & Wireless have been in discussions with five of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St.

Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica, who indicated in 1999 that they wished to negotiate on a collective basis.

Progress on these discussions has been and continues to be slow, and Cable & Wireless had hoped that the last meeting between its representatives and the OECS Ministers on January 31 would reach a settlement of the outstanding issues but was disappointed that the meeting failed to get started.

And concerning St. Lucia, the company statement said: "Cable & Wireless will work with the Government of St. Lucia to ensure that the transfer of the country's telecommunications operations is as smooth as possible in accordance with the terms of the relevant licenses. Every effort will be made to protect the interests of Cable & Wireless' customers and employees.'' C&W pulls out of St. Lucia Cable & Wireless Financial Director, Robert Lenwill, who has responsibility for the Caribbean, sent a letter to St. Lucian Prime minister Dr. Kenny Anthony just before Christmas in which he said that the company would pull out of the country unless a better effort was made on the part of Government to resolve a number of matters pertaining to its future operations in the country.

The issues included tariff rebalancing, the phased introduction of competition and a fair interconnect regime, but before any real progress had been made in resolving these issues, the Government of St. Lucia enacted new telecommunications legislation and issued a license to a new operator, resulting in an uncertain operating environment.

The company statement said: "Although the Government of St. Lucia had indicated its preparedness to extend Cable & Wireless' licences in the short term to facilitate completion of negotiations, the basis of these licence extensions is unclear and appears inconsistent with both the bringing into effect of the new Telecommunications Act and the issue of a VSAT licence to one call centre services operator.'' The company said they had amply demonstrated its commitment to encouraging new business ventures in St. Lucia and had in fact, offered St. Lucian company HTS IT very competitively priced call services.

And they said that a good example of their commitment is the facilitation given to Call Centres of Grenada, which currently employs 700 people.

The company said they continued to make excellent progress in agreeing the basis for liberalising telecommunications markets elsewhere in the wider Caribbean region.

Cable & Wireless have said they remain committed to the OECS and to the introduction of competition in these states provided this takes place in a fair, orderly and sustainable manner, governed by effective primary legislation and regulations.

The company have expressed their willingness to continue negotiations with OECS and ECTEL in order to reach an agreement on the regulatory and operating environment in the region.

By 2001, Cable and Wireless' global infrastructure will connect to 84 hubs around the world, including 50 key commercial cities in 16 European Countries.

Already, the company has over 7,000 miles of fibre network coverage in Europe, 6,000 in Japan and 17,000 in North America.

Cable and Wireless owns 460,000 km of submarine cable around the world, sufficient to circle the equator 11.5 times, making it the world's second largest owner of cable capacity.

Cable and Wireless have been providing Bermuda's international telecommunications since 1890.