And while that is micro-business, the municipal bond is big business. It's an 18 million dollar bond offering -t eh first of its kind in the region.
Long promised, for months, we've been commenting on its failure to launch - as the prospectus was first promised in July, then August, then September, and now October is finished.
That's why we were surprised today when the mayor told us that it will be launched in two weeks.
Here's his interview:
Jules Vasquez
"Is it real? Is the prospectus finally upon us?"
Darrell Bradley - Mayor, Belize City Council
"This is our final draft in terms of the prospectus. What we've done is we've circulated it to some of our stakeholders so that there will be just a final review. And of course, we're going to send it out to get published with a nice design and other things like that. For a prospectus, it's a reasonably sized document. Everything has come together, and we've declared November 15, as our launch date for the municipal bond prospectus. And we expect that a significant amount of the bond will be sold on November 15, or very shortly thereafter, and very shortly after that, we will get in flows."
Jules Vasquez
"Who will be the principal strategic investors? There are rumors about it that it will be - the Belize Bank has shown interest, and so has Social Security. Eternally Liquid will also be buying into it. Is that accurate?"
Darrell Bradley
"Well, we have been making presentations to both those organizations, in addition to others. Of course, you know that bond will serve as the liquidity reserve requirement for insurance companies. And so, insurance companies have expressed a significant interest in buying into the bond program. We've also been talking with very large businesses. I don't want to name them over the air, but a lot of people have expressed interest in buying into the program. And what we expect is that we will have a good idea of where we are at November 15, in terms of who all will be subscribers, and I expect that we will sell a significant amount of the bond within a day or a couple days after the release."
Tomorrow we'll have more of our discussion with the mayor about the in's and out's of the bond and whether city hall has run itself broke with all those concrete streets.
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