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Jules Vasquez, reporter
"Do you accept any blame, any culpability for the defects, the much cited defects in the settlement agreement?"

Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow - Prime Minister
"Absolutely. Look, I didn't draft the agreement, but it turned out that the agreement was not the best drafted agreement in the world. Now, I don't know that there ever such a thing as a perfectly drafted agreement. That is why there are always court cases in consequence of disputes over the meanings of language in various agreements, but to the extent that there may be obvious boners in terms of this particular agreement and the particular wording. If I missed some as you called lacunae, then I will be perfectly prepared to engage in a mea culpa."

Jules Vasquez, reporter
"Were you outdone, outwitted by Mr. Ashcroft? It's you two who sat and negotiated the settlement. He has come out with half a billion [dollars] out of it."

Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow - Prime Minister
"Listen, Jules, what the Ashcroft Alliance has gotten is what the tribunal ordered them to get. I was trying to steal a march on them by insisting on the settlement agreement that provided for the accommodation agreement element of the award to be used in a particular way."

"So that I wasn't able to get back out of that accommodation agreement element of the award more than just under 11 million dollars. I consider a matter of great regret, but you can't turn that into some victory for the Alliance. What they have ended up with is what the tribunal gave to them. You can make the point as you have that I did not ended up getting as much as I wanted to and as I felt I should have in terms of the amount for the Belizean people. But ultimately, it was coming out of what the tribunal had found belongs to the Ashcroft Alliance. You take the company, you have to pay for it and we always knew that."