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Today, the Minister of Transport said that he believed the request for a delay was a last-ditch effort after the BBA failed to submit their concerns on time:

Dr. Louis Zabaneh, Minister of Transport
"They had sent a list of their recommendations to the bill in the Senate however as a matter of procedure, the period for which they would have done that had already passed and they had already sent those same concerns to the House and those were also aired in the debate at the Senate so I saw it as a last ditch scheme to in one way or another influence the outcome. But by that time it was too late because as you saw we got very high support, 9 senators in favor and 4 against. So with respect to that point, I think that there was no basis for them to really try to do that other than to maybe stir some kind of public response."

"We've always been extremely respectful with all the members of the BBA while at the same time pointing out those actions that we feel are not in the best interest of the public. So for example we've always stated that our doors remain open for them to have conversations with us about government's policy which is to have a public private partnership with the operators that we've repeated out of 31 we have 18 of them and out of the 18, 15 are small operators. So after pointing that out, I think we did not hear that again, that argument they're bringing that somehow the BBA are the small operators and now the big bad NBC is here to get government's support and then adversely affect their livelihoods and so we pointed that out that 15 small operators and 3 larger ones decided voluntarily to be part of the NBC when they took the time to do the analysis of the benefits and cost with respect to NBC. Now they're bringing some other points to try and suggest that the government's policy is not fair to them as small operators and this is furthest from the truth because we reiterate that the doors remain open."

"We're always open to hearing good constructive suggestions."