But what about the 21 original loans which created the Superbond in the first place. Those are all high interest commercial loans at 9% and above which the PUP made in the early to mid 2000's. Briceno was Deputy Prime Minister during that period and he didn't flinch today when we put it to him that the Superbond is a problem of the PUP's making:...
Jules Vasquez, 7News
"How do you respond to that, that it is in fact a broom of extremely reckless spending or reckless borrowing which led to this?"
Hon. John Briceno, Leader of the Opposition
"Well I am glad that you ask that question, because we have a few points to make to counter that. Why is it that we did those loans? If you can remember we have several hurricanes when we were in government. We had Hurricane Mitch, Iris, Dean (we still suffer Hurricane Dean right now). Hurricanes that affected us when we were in government - we had losses of 1.2 billion dollars of GDP. We knew that we had to quickly when the hurricane hit us here in San Pedro and Caye Caulker - we knew we had to get monies very quickly to get them going. So we had to borrow some monies yes, at some onerous interest rates. But we felt that getting the economy going was most important. Making sure that we were ready for the tourist season was very important. So we made a lot of loans with high interest rates."
"So the Prime Minister needs to stop the cry over this thing. He said he had the answers. He said that he could have solved this. We are 9 years later and still he continues to cry. He needs to man-up."
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