But it's not so simple for the country hard currency reserves. Those should be at least equivalent to three months of exports - and making this payment will immediately wipe out 20% of those reserves.
The Prime Minister says that the amount had been budgeted - but not in US dollars. He discussed making the payment and the impact it will have on the reserves:
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow- Prime Minister
"These payments are not anything new. They are payments under the award, the quantum of which we've known for well over a year now. We do feel that the Belizean people have been shortchanged in that the amount of the funding of local projects is under $11 million, we had expected far more. We are still trying to understand how the Ashcroft people slipped the nose in terms of their being able to have the court approve the quantum that the court did as representing their liabilities. It is a fair deal of foreign exchange that we have to find but we can comfortably find it and that is the only sense in which it is of significance. It does nothing with respect to the budget, does nothing with respect to the fiscal position and in so far as it is important in the context of the central bank's reserves, those payments can and will be comfortably managed. At the end of the year, after we make these foreign currency payments to the Ashcroft people next week, in fact, our import cover will be 15.6 weeks, so we are comfortably above what is considered the safe minimum in terms of these international yardsticks."
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