Last night, 7News told you about Imer Hernandez, who won the 6 million dollar contract to upgrade the Belize City Municipal Airstrip. Well, tonight, we can confirm that Hernandez is also the holder of the contract to renovate the Belmopan market.
This is a public works project which is funded by the European Union and supervised by the Ministry of Works. His company placed a bid of 2 million dollars, and it was accepted by the Evaluation Committee. So, he's now in the second of a 12 month project in addition to the works which he must provide for the Belize City Municipal Airstrip.
But you may wonder why, and rightly so because that San Antonio Road scandal remains unresolved. Prime Minister Dean Barrow, as the Minister of Finance, has promised that he will continue to look into it, but Hernandez continues to win contracts.
Apparently, Prime Minister Dean Barrow isn't taken any issue with that; in fact, he says that he has confidence in the mechanisms by which he's being awarded them.
Jules Vasquez asked him last week Thursday about that issue in the context of the unresolved San Antonio Road works. Here's how that conversation went.
Jules Vasquez
"Shouldn't we be concerned that Imer Hernandez, nephew of the Deputy Prime Minister, is being awarded contracts with some hazing of details in Orange Walk North?"
Hon. Dean Barrow – Prime Minister of Belize
"Well I don't know that he's been awarded any contract since…or that he has done any work there since the series of works done at that time which was in 2012. I get the sense that Mister Hernandez—who from all reports is an excellent contractor—has moved on to far bigger things. I believe he has one a number of contracts funded by the international agencies, which you know those tenders are scrutinized very carefully. And so there has been no need. I did not at the time see any difficulty at all with Mister Hernandez's Company being contracted to do the works, providing that we were going to get value for money. And I repeat, there was nothing that I had heard that suggested that Mister Hernandez had a track record to suggest that anything other than value for money would be what we would have obtained from him."
And, there is an update to that campaign which started yesterday. The entity involved wants to keep the unresolved San Antonio works in the public consciousness. To that end, another mass of emails was sent out today in which all the watch dog organizations and personalities were called out for what the sender describes as a lack of interest.
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