The payment to the Ashcroft Alliance’s BISL for BZD 76.5 million dollars will go to the Senate for final approval; Prime Minister Briceño said this payment ends all legal claims related to the matter
BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Aug. 25, 2022
Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a Supplementary Appropriation Bill, for the allocation of an additional BZD $76.5 million to cover the cost of the settlement agreement reached between the Government of Belize and the Ashcroft Alliance’s Belize International Services Limited (BISL), following what BISL claimed was an unlawful termination of its contract to operate the two registries in the country—the International Merchant Marine Registry of Belize (IMMARBE) and the International Business Companies Registry (IBCR). The bill was approved in the House with little resistance from the Opposition and will now be sent to the Senate to be rubber-stamped before payment is made to Waterloo Investments Holdings and Morgan y Morgan (a Panamanian law firm), the two former owners of the registries operated under BISL.
The PM, in explaining the reasons for the payout, said that the debt, to which up to $17,000 in interest is added daily, would balloon in size if not settled; and he further noted that this settlement, which is a little more than half of the amount initially demanded, will end the claim definitively and thus remove another legal claim that has been looming over the Belizean public.
“The claim was for over 65 million US dollars or 130 million Belize dollars. The BISL claim, I must stress, grows every day, with daily interest depending on the eventual core compensation of between BZ$4,000-$17,000 a day, and so after the proposed settlement, government will still net US48,615,000,789. Simply put, government pays this now so that it can avoid paying a whole lot more at some time in the future,” PM Briceño said.
PM Briceño then pointed to the action which prompted the litigation that resulted in the claim—a decision by the Barrow administration to take over the two registries managed by BISL. By doing so, Barrow brought an end to a contract with BISL that had been extended by a former PUP administration—an act by Barrow that BISL claimed was wrongful. That contract was first granted in 1993, but in 2003 was extended—allowing the company to continue managing the registries until 2013. However, two years later, in 2005, they were given a subsequent extension to operate from 2013 to 2020. It was an extension that the Barrow administration considered unlawful, and in 2013, it took control of the registries. The company then filed a claim on March 26, 2015, against the government for damages caused by a breach of the contract, but both the country’s Supreme Court and Appeals Court ruled in favor of the government. The company, however, pursued litigation all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice, which ruled in favor of the company and ordered the Supreme Court to determine a quantum.
At the House of Representatives meeting on Wednesday, however, the Leader of the Opposition, Hon. Moses “Shyne” Barrow, asserted that the 2005 agreement was done under the table and was illegal.
“What the Prime Minister did not mention is that no one knew about the 15-year extension that then Prime Minister Musa gave to BISL. I don’t even think the Cabinet at the time knew about the secret agreement,” Barrow claimed.
Another member of the Opposition, Albert area representative, Hon. Tracy Panton, questioned how the government has been able to allocate sufficient funds to clear this legal claim but postponed the marijuana legalization referendum because of its estimated 5-million-dollar price tag.
“In one payment we can settle a 38.5 million US dollars, 76 million dollars [Belize] on the backs of the Belizeans. Wasn’t it just the last House meeting when the government coerced the churches to say we will put a hold on the referendum on marijuana because we can’t be afforded the $5 million? But yet, Mr. Speaker, we can find 76 million dollars to meet this debt obligation in one payment, not through a payment plan, not in installments, that would be less burdensome for the Belizean people—in one payment,” Panton said.
When interviewed by reporters after the House meeting, the Prime Minister reiterated that the payment of the settlement would be final, and he pledged, in the spirit of transparency, to share all the documentation related to the settlement with the public.
“The point that I would like to make is that the $38.25 million US, of which 11.5 million is going to be paid in Belize dollars, is final. That’s it. We won’t owe them anything. They are not going to come later and say, ‘Oh, you owe me court fees or lawyer fees’—nothing; we will settle there. From our end, we have not received the bills from Dr. Ben Rossovich, Senior Queen Counsel, and also from Hallmark Advisory. From what I understand, and I need to get more clarity, I don’t think we’re going to get a bill from them. They just want it to help to settle this, did this issue and felt that it was, you know, we just had to do trying to save money for the Belize people,” Prime Minister Briceño commented.
Current Minister of Foreign Affairs and Lead Senator for Government Business, Hon. Eamon Courtenay, was one of the lawyers representing BISL in its claim against the government of Belize prior to the 2020 general elections. His law firm, Courtenay Coye LLP, which is also part-owned by Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance, Hon. Chris Coye, is expected to collect a hefty sum for their work representing the Ashcroft Alliance in this case. The PM, in an interview yesterday, said that Courtenay recused himself from the Cabinet meeting at which the matter was discussed, and had nothing to do with the settlement agreement reached between the Government and BISL.
“What I can tell you, Courtenay and Coye did not participate in the settlement. They participated in going to court up to 2020, but since [they] have come into the office they have had no participation on this, and Minister Courtenay walked out at mid-day before this issue came up to Cabinet, and Minister Coye was out of the country with his family,” PM Briceño said.
Notably, during the discussion of the supplementary appropriation at the House of Representatives meeting on Wednesday, Minister of Education, Culture, Science and Technology, Hon. Francis Fonseca, pointed to the need for Belize to adhere to the rule of law.
“This settlement requires each of us to ask one fundamental question: are we as a nation committed to the rule of law? Are we a nation of laws? Or are we a rogue nation? That’s the fundamental question. Are we a rogue country that thumbs its nose at the highest court in our jurisdiction, the Caribbean Court of Justice? That really is the only question before us today,” stated Fonseca.One such judgment handed down by the CCJ which met resistance from the Belize government at the time (the Barrow administration) was the Universal Health Services (USH) judgment order— an order to pay the Belize Bank compensation for a guarantee provided by the Musa administration for a loan received by private investors in the Universal Health Services (UHS) hospital. There had been allegations of illegality and ethical violations surrounding that deal prior to the CCJ ruling however—with reports that a grant of over $20 million from Venezuela to fund the construction of houses (in addition to another $20 million granted by Taiwan) was diverted to the bank by the Musa administration, as payment to settle the claim, without National Assembly approval. In 2008, Prime Minister Barrow told the public, “… There is the written agreement that made it absolutely plain that this was an international agreement committing the government of Belize to use these funds for the specified purposes. $9 million was for use in home improvement loans and the other ten million, which Amalai Mai instructed the Venezuelans to send to an account in the UK held in the name of the Belize Bank, was for use in new home construction. The confirmation note sent by the relevant Venezuelan agency, BANDES is the Spanish acronym, to the Belize Bank with respect to the fact that the $10 million had been wired, had clearly on the face of it wording that said that this was in connection with the disbursement being made to the government of Belize for use in housing construction…” (7News transcript—March 2008)
He then went on to state, “… the enormity of what has been done is compounded by this fact: forty million dollars gifted to us by Venezuela and Taiwan was paid over to the Belize Bank. We did not end up owning the hospital, notwithstanding that $40 million was paid. That money was then, as we understand it, deposited in the name of a charitable trust registered in Nevis but operating at a Turks and Caicos Belize Bank account.” An AMANDALA article in May 2009 had said that Musa at one point was “facing a charge of theft in relation to the payment of … US$10 million—the grant coming from the Government of Venezuela to Belize, billed for housing for the poor—to pay the UHS debt” to the Belize Bank.
And thus it was that, after the CCJ subsequently issued a judgment which ordered the then Barrow administration to settle the Belize Bank’s claim, that administration refused to comply. Parliament at the time voted against a supplementary bill that was tabled to cover the debt, which former Prime Minister, Dean Barrow, referred to as “immoral.”
The Belize Bank, owned by a subsidiary of Waterloo Investment Holdings Limited, took the case in 2019 to the Supreme Court and was given leave to use unpaid business tax to recover the sums from the claim. There is no indication if a firm agreement was reached between the government and the bank to finally determine a settlement for that debt, and there is no indication if the sum owed by the government, a total of 95 million dollars at the time it was quantified, is still growing. A timeline is not set for when Belize Bank will stop using funds that should be allocated for business tax to settle the UHS claim.
During yesterday’s interview, the PM spoke briefly on the matter, and claimed that it had already been settled. “That has already been negotiated. That has already been settled, and they are using the tax monies to be able to pay themselves, but no, they have not come to us and said, ‘mek we work out something, make we discount and pay it off’. No, they have not come to us with something like that.”
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