Foreign Direct Investment (fDi) magazine named CIRI President and Chief Executive Officer Margie Brown its fDi Personality of the Year 2008 – North America. The prestigious award recognizes political and business leaders who have been the most proactive and innovative in improving their region’s business environment.
fDi is an international business publication that focuses on globalization issues and cross-border expansion. fDi is published by the London-based Financial Times Group, which owns the well known British daily business newspaper Financial Times.
Previous Personality of the Year winners include Mexican President Vicente Fox (2003), Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (2004),Mayor of Seoul Lee Myung-bak (2005), Premier of Ontario Dalton McGuinty (2006) and Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath (2007).
This year’s overall Personality of the Year winner is Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, for the Middle East region. fDi selected Jose Pedro de Morais, Angola’s finance minister, for Africa; Vikrom Kromadit, chief executive of Thai industrial estate developer Amata Corp., for Asia; Santiago Cortes, chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Spain, for Europe; Alessandro Teixeira, head of Brazil’s investment promotion agency ApexBrazil and the World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (WAIPA), for Latin America.
fDi selected Brown for the North America award in part because of CIRI’s success in changing the traditional Alaska business model of Outside entities extracting resources from Alaska and taking their profits home. CIRI and other Alaska Native corporations have, instead, gone outside Alaska to do business and brought their revenues and profits back home, much of which goes to shareholders, the majority of whom reside in Alaska. This sustainable business model is a direct result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and the efforts of Alaska Natives to successfully implement it, which Brown has been intimately involved in.
