By Michael Field 

The Natadola TalkFest came with a presentation entitled "Pacific Bridge to Noble Wealth" that was delivered by a crowd called "Pangea World", a new world kind of thing out of California. 

Voreqe Bainimarama and friends signed up to something about "the potential opportunities available for Pacific countries to integrate knowledge-based economies and tourism industries for sustainable development". But like all these kind of carpet-bagging things, certain clues give it away. 

On its website, Pangea World gives its offices as being at University Tower, 4199 Campus Drive, Suite 550, Irvine, California. "University Tower"? 

Sounds promising. 

But, its just actually an office block surrounded by parking lots and cheap eats. And guess what, go to Suite 550 and you will find, not Pacific Noble Wealth, but one Dominic E Rainone, an Italian American lawyer who used to work with a computer company and now deals with software legal issues. 

So is he going to lead the Pacific to glory? 

Well, no; good old Dom is just a mail and fax drop operation. "Pangea World" is a shell - a website and a place where somebody answers a phone pretending to be a whole new world. 

Promising.

The self-proclaimed CEO of Pangea World is one Hana Ayala who is married to Francisco Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine. 

Ayala fronted up at Natadola with Michael Clegg of the United States National Academy of Sciences. 

He is also into genetics and teaches at the same university. No doubt all that is a coincidence. 

Czech born Hana Ayala is touting a concept she calls "Rethinking Oceania". She says the project presents a historic opportunity for Pacific countries to elevate themselves out of aid dependency and become champions of their own destinies. She wants a transition to a "knowledge economy" in which investments in basic and applied research increasingly affect the economic competitiveness of corporations and nations. 

She went out to the Lau group which she says offer an extraordinary laboratory that can redefine sustainable development prospects for Fiji and other parts of the region. 

"I strive to elevate this region to become a flagship of this new economic development model as an inspiration to the rest of the world." 

In practical terms, the website offers no clues as to what Ayala is on about. They have no track record, they have achieved nothing substantial beyond creating a website.

 Plainly Pangea World is not doing all this to just pass the day. The clue lies in what she calls "IQ Resorts" which offer, she says, hotels in an "exotic settings and a sophisticated scientific milieu". 

In other words, Pangea is just some kind of hotel operator trying to get into places on the cheap by dressing it all up as something noble and wealthy. The nice thing about Pacific carpet baggers is that they always seem to leave. 

July 24, 2010

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