Erick Brimen is the founder and CEO of Próspera, the privately governed special economic zone (ZEDE) on the island of Roatán, Honduras, and of NeWAY Capital, the firm behind it. A Venezuelan-born former investment banker, he has led Próspera’s development as a charter-city project with its own legal, regulatory and tax framework.
He grew up in Venezuela and left at fourteen for school in the United States, and traces the project to what he watched happen at home: not a shortage of resources or talent, but the steady destruction of the rules that let people build anything. He studied at Babson College, worked in private banking, mergers and acquisitions and consulting, then as a chief financial officer in Latin America, and co-founded an online insurance brokerage in Colombia before founding NeWAY Capital in 2013.
Próspera opened in 2017 under the Honduran ZEDE framework with its own regulatory system, courts and taxes, and the claim that a business can be established there faster and more cheaply than anywhere else in the hemisphere. Brimen has spent as much time defending it as building it, first against opposition on Roatán and later against the Honduran government, which repealed the ZEDE statute. The dispute is now in international arbitration, and he has testified about it before a committee of the United States Congress.