  Right now, just about every major media house in Belize is in Punta Gorda on a tour of the Sarstoon Temash National Park and adjoining communities. Now, this is a kind of rogue move because SATIIM no longer co-manages the Park, and today's tour included a trip to the US Capital Energy Drill Site called Temash Number 2. SATIIM took community leaders there last week where it led to a showdown with police who were protecting the site. And this morning before the media departed, King who we mat at the Belize city Municiapl Airport warned that there was a right way and a wrong way to do things – and at a meeting yesterday, he urged Choc to do things the right way:..
Alistair King - Country Representative, US Capital Energy
"Well the meeting we had yesterday wasn't really about that but it came up. Anybody has to get permission from the Forest Department first to go into the park because they are the management of the park."
Reporter
"Has that permission been given as far as you know?"
Alistair King
"No, not to my knowledge"
Reporter
"What do you think of today's trip, do you think the media will be permitted to go along with SATIM to tour the park and other facilities?"
Alistair King
"Well, I spoke to Mr. Bardalez - the district Forest Officer and I think he will be down there and because of the safety issue - it has to be organized, we can't have a whole crowd of people going there at one time. What we asked Greg is if he could give us a list of names and send it to Forestry Department of who is going and why you wanted to go in and see and then it would have gone through the process. That would have been an organized thing and apparently Greg didn't want to do that."
Despite those protests, we understand the visit went without incident and 7news will have the full report on Monday.
In another development on the same story, US Capital Energy has adopted the position of the Ministry of Energy, Science and Technology and Public Utilities which yesterday called SATIIM irresponsible for misinforming the public regarding the ruling of the Court of Appeals. King says in the south, there's been a lot of misinformation generated by SATIIM:…
Alistair King
"You know I live down there so there's a lot of mis information on what the real verdict was on the Appeal's court and I think the government needs to get down there or the attorney general's office or the lawyers and explain to the people what the verdict really meant because everybody has a different idea. There's confusion down there and a lot of people don't really understand what the outcome of that verdict was. We're only doing what we're allowed to do under our promise issued by the government so we don't see how we can get a bad image when we apply to all the rules, we work closely with the government - they have their inspectors down there on a regular basis. We can't do more than what we're doing -in a way we're caught up between this fight between SATIM and the Forest Department."
On Monday, 7news will have both sides of that story. And we'll also have new son the burning issue within SATIIM – whether executive director Greg Choc is resigning and heading to law school as has been reported. Well he continues to dodge the question! And even though he is with the media all day – he still hasn't answered the question, but promised to do so at a press conference in Midway village that is supposed to be happening this evening.
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