America news, NEW YORK, NY, Thursday. August 24, 2022: Executives at Invest Caribbean, the Caribbean’s 11-year-old global private sector investment agency, were forced this week to enforce their trademark against Salaudeen Nausrudeen and partners, who are promoted as three Caribbean heads of state.
ICN, which owns the brand, was forced on August 22, 2022, to send a cease and desist letter to the operators of a website started by Salaudeen Nausrudeen, with the publicly promoted support of the governments of the Republic of Guyana, Trinidad. and Tobago and Barbados – along with named partners: Caribbean Development Bank, CARICOM DEVELOPMENT FUND and Republic Financial Holdings Limited – demanding the immediate removal and termination of future use of its copyright trademark “Invest Caribbean” – from the public domain.
INVEST CARIBBEAN is a trademark owned by ICN LLC and is publicly accessible via the domains: investcaribbeannow.com and investcaribbean.today. Use of the company name in any form, without the company’s permission, is a violation of US trademark laws.
But that didn’t stop Nausrudeen, who together with the heads of state The Republic of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados brazenly launched the bogus “Invest Caribbean” during the Agri Investment Forum & Expo II in Trinidad over the weekend of August 21st.strto “serve the investment needs of CARICOM”.
Invest Caribbean founder and CEO of ICN Group, Felicia J. Persaud, said she was shocked on Monday, August 22.n.dto receive news articles from Guyana questioning whether they were headed to Trinidad because of the flagrant violation by Nausrudeen and his supporters.
Persaud, a Caribbean immigrant and US citizen, said as the domain and name were taken down on August 23st due to the cease and desist and a complaint also filed with the hosting company, the site was relaunched as ‘CaribInvestors’ on August 24th, with the same image and photos of the President of Guyana, Irfaan Ally, and Prime Ministers of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, Mia Mottley and Keith Rowley on the main page, as on the offending page. However, the site still carried another colossal breach – “© 2022 InvestCaribbean. All Rights Reserved” – at the bottom of its homepage as of today.
The website has Bridgetown, Barbados listed as its location and has a Barbados number and an apparent alliance with Invest Barbados, as calling the number resulted in someone answering the phone as Invest Barbados. Invest Barbados CEO Kaye-Anne Greenidge was also the first to respond to ICN about its Cease and Desist order, to offer “the most sincere apology for any inadvertent offense that may have occurred”.
Nausrudeen, who has now departed from the owner of the communications company and creator of the booking engine in Guyana, in the Caribbean investment space, has claimed that the copying of the entire sale of the ICN brand name was “just a coincidence” in his response by email. Incidentally, his Instagram handle is “@goinvestguyana”, a reference to the Investment Guyana agency which has no listing of Nausrudeen on its staff.
ICN says it will also file a formal complaint with the US State Department’s Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement for infringement of its intellectual property rights as a US company with a US global brand.
“For three Caribbean governments, Republic Bank, CDB and CARICOM, to be associated with such a blatant fraud speaks volumes about the way business is done in this region,” said Persaud. “It is precisely the reason why many investors are wary of investing in the Caribbean region and many project developers have a nightmare to secure funds to build their projects in this region.”
ABOUT INVEST CARIBBEAN
Invest Caribbean was founded in 2011 by Persaud and has been the ongoing conduit between private and institutional financiers and governments, and private sector developers in the Caribbean region specifically. It has been praised by both regional governments and leading global CEOs, including Sir Richard Branson, for its effectiveness in being a matchmaker between financiers and developers. In 2021, it was Invest Caribbean that joined Caribbean citizens around the world, and the Government of Jamaica to celebrate the election of the first Caribbean American Vice President, Kamala Harris.
His main focus since then has been on promoting investment in the Caribbean and matching developers and businesses with the best possible financing options available globally.
Persaud is a Guyanese-born, immigrant journalist, lawyer and entrepreneur who has spent over 20 years of her life advocating for the respect of the region and its people as a leader in the US Caribbean diaspora, including ensuring that Caribbean nationals to be able to be counted on US Census forms.
She is listed in the US State Department speaker database and quoted by many media outlets. Persaud is also a pioneer in the US Caribbean market, founding the only Caribbean PR Wire, CaribPR Wire, now part of CISION PR Newswire. Her point extends to her establishment of the first daily news television for the Caribbean in the Diaspora, now News Americas News Network, a network of 21 Caribbean sites that are federated to Google News and Apple News as well as Synigate; and award-winning PR, AD and Digital Media Solutions Agency, Hard Beat Communications.
