TANAGER TOURISM corp.

Hip hip hurrah, we’ve got a company: Tanager Tourism corporation officially exists in Panama as of Friday 21 July, when we signed the paperwork at our lawyers’ office. Tanager Tourism has 500 shares, the value of which we have yet to determine in a meeting o the board of directors (Loes and Kees). Before getting on with that though, we had a beer (or two) to celebrate this fact in a pub around the corner.

Unlike in Mozambique, all paperwork was organized within one week and we received everything at once from our lawyers: statutes, impressive looking certificates, each worth a number of shares and value. Furthermore a book in which we have to register who has how many shares and a book with numbered pages in which to keep the minutes of annual board meetings. The latter book is no longer obligatory, but it looks very formal and impressive.

A process like this would easily take six months or more in Mozambique. Statutes are still written by hand in two separate official registries maintained at the notary office. Just verifying whether the name you want is available, takes one week. After that you have to write another umpty letters, all with notarized signatures to all sorts of important people, requesting them to certify something which is their job. The book for registration of the minutes has to be sent to the court to have the pages numbered by hand. So time flies…

So Business set up in Panama was a pleasant surprise. Registration was accomplished within the time estimated by the lawyer and, actual costs were only 3$25 above actual cost, an error of only 0.3%. We are quite impressed with our lawyer so far. There remain things to be done (of course). We can now apply for a commercial license to start trading in Panama and register ourselves as investors, to take advantage of a number of existing incentives and tax exemptions for tourism businesses. But we have taken an important first step. We can now open a bank account without having to deposit and maintain a ludicrously high amount of money in the account.

We still have to get a declaration of good conduct for our visa application. We’ve got an impressive looking piece of paper from the Mozambican government with about 6 stamps, each one more impressive looking than the previous one, but not impressive enough for the Panamanian government. Since we don’t want to go back to Mozambique for just one stamp (and we did ask specifically for the one we need, the Apostille of the Convention of The Hague, but no official knew where to get that) we will get one from Holland. That also has its little problems (translations needed), but those appear to be easily surmountable. As you can see, bureaucracy is keeping both us and the Panamanian government pretty busy.