7 News Belize

War Of Words Over Workers Trust Continues
posted (December 11, 2017)
Last week Thursday, we showed you the press conference that the Public Sector Workers Trust, the Public Service Union and the BNTU held. They wanted to answer questions about the state of affairs with the Trust. That's after the 600 retired public officers sued them over management and control of just under 8 million dollars in back pay and won.

Well, just a few hours before the start of tonight's news, the claimants, who brought the lawsuit against the Unions and the Trust on behalf of the retired public officers, called a press conference to respond.

They want to clear up some areas they feel the other side has deliberately clouded up. One issue is their interpretation of the judgment. We pick up the conversation where their attorney detailed the exact orders of the judgement:

Magali Marin-Young, Attorney for the Claimants
"Ultimately the court decided that the trust deed was void. It decided that the true beneficiaries were those public officers who were employed between 1995-1997. The court also asked the trustees who were the unions to do a full accounting of all funds that they have received between 1997-2014. So that is the gist of the decision of this court. So this matter has been tried and there is an actual decision on the case. The court, however, ordered that the unions in consultation with the beneficiaries and the government come up with a draft of a proper trust deed to reflect the true purpose of the trust and to reflect who are the true beneficiaries of this trust. And gave the parties liberty to apply, to enforce its order."

Reporter
"Since the trust deed that they drafted in 2013 was determined to be null and void, how do you and your clients regard the current trustees who are setting in those positions? Is it legal that they are still sitting as trustees even though they were empowered by a trust deed that has been struck down?"

Magali Marin-Young
"That's a very legal question. But yes, when any property is handed to any person and in this case, the background that in 2007 government transferred the BTL shares to the unions and then in 2014 it transfer all the income derived from these shares to the unions. But in law whenever property is transferred to you in trust for somebody else, you are trustee. So presently the unions are the defacto trustees of this fund, until a proper trust deed is drafted. The beneficiaries were seeking to restrain the trustees from lending monies, disbursing monies out of the trust funds and we were successful in getting an order restraining the trustees from disbursing trust funds without permission of the court."

Reporter
"Is that an injunction?"

Magali Marin-Young
"Yes it is. There is a restraint on them. A restraint is an injunction."

We also asked them for their perspective on the Trust's continuation of their loans program to all public officers. As you heard, the trust should be used for benefit of only those public officers where were there between 1995 to 1997, and thus affected by the wage and increment freeze.

Their attorney says that they have serious concerns about the way that the trust has been using the money. Here's what she had to say on that topic:

Reporter
"How do you guys regard this loan scheme which was being allowed or from their perspective it's still ongoing to all public officers?"

Magali Marin-Young, Attorney for the Claimants
"The purpose for which government established this trust and which it promise to these public officers why it was establishing this trust was to provide for programs that would be beneficial to them. The trustees has established a lending scheme using trust funds presently and have been lending to public officers generally, unsecured loans. We understand that they are taking a security some charge on the emoluments of public officers, but for the most part the little we have gathered is that they are unsecured loans and it's not exclusively to the benefit of the true beneficiaries. It has been established for all public officers."

"Now, the trustees have told the court the loans, the lending scheme is an investment. They are earning interest on those loans and they consider it an investment. We do have concerns relating to the lending scheme, because I have provided you with the trustees auditors report for the financial year 2015 and when we peruse the auditor's report, over $430,000 has been loan to the unions themselves and we see a category there as associations. We do not know what those associations are. So that is the reason we have asked the court for an accounting. That is the reason the court order for them to provide us a full list, because we want to understand who has benefitted from the lending scheme and we are particularly concern about the unions who are trustees of this fund lending themselves money and it's not a little bit of money, it is a lot. It is up until the end of 2015. It is in excess of $430,000 according to their own auditors report."

So, the court has ordered that a new trust deed be drafted, in consultation with the claimants and the Government of Belize. The Government must be the settlor of this new trust deed, and it must reflect that only the public officers from that 95-97 wage freeze are the true beneficiaries.

So after that point, what do the claimants want? Well, they say, they have no interest in forcefully taking control of the Trust from the Unions' trustees. They told us that all they want is to get some sort of compensation for the wage and increment freeze. Here's how Sheila Genitty explained it:

Sheila Genitty, Claimant
"The area that they mentioned that we want to manage the trust was never true. That was never our goal. I want to go back to the reason why this trust was set up. In those 2 years all the beneficiaries and public officers who were working at that time lost 2 years of increment. Now that multiply, because by the time we retired those 2 years of increment cause our gratuity to be smaller, because it was work out on a lower salary. It caused our pensions to be smaller. Our objective from the beginning was to be compensated for the loss that we had and I will go back to increment. The way an increment works is between the employer and the employee. It is an award-base system. You work well, you get your increment. They employer pays when your increment is awarded to you."

"Now we cannot understand how it is that the loss that we suffered, instead of that money coming to us or the dividends coming to us who suffered the loss, it was given to a third party and the third party is the unions and then now they sit in control of that funds. So in effect what they are doing, they are denying me and denying Mr. Gardener and Miss Ruth and every other beneficiary the increments that should have received. The unions were never a part of the increment program. When you work you get your increment. The union has nothing to do with that. So why should they sit now in a position of control to say 'you will not get anything, you have to bring a proposal, you have to bring something else to be able to get something from this fund.' Everybody else is benefitting and the people who lost have received nothing."

"We are not interested in running a trust. We want to be compensated. That was always our goal. One of the misinformation out there is that there is no way of finding out who the beneficiaries are and the number of beneficiaries. That's what the union keep saying. They'd been saying that for the past 20 years. They'd been saying that since 2014 and we made a call out there in the media and we received names. People contributed to our fund, so we were able to get legal counsel and we have a list, so to me it seems that the unions deliberately mean to pretend that they can't get a list of beneficiaries. We have the list of beneficiaries right here. The fact that we could get this, they could have done the same."

Reporter
"How many are on that list?"

Sheila Genitty, Claimant
"On this list we have 5,861 people on this list."

Ruth White, Claimant
"We have concluded that the intention they have never had an intention to acknowledge us as beneficiaries, even though the court has ordered or stated it clearly that we are the beneficiaries."

The mediation sessions are still outstanding. The claimants tell us that they are hoping that in the final draft of this new Trust Deed, they are looking for 2 important things.

They want other persons who have no connections to the union to be named trustees. The way they see it, those persons would act as an oversight mechanism to review decisions that the Union's trustees make, to make sure that it is in the best interest of the true beneficiaries.

Secondly, they want a protector to be selected who also has no connection to the union, again, to act as a second level of scrutiny.

Home | Archives | Downloads/Podcasts | Advertise | Contact Us

7 News Belize