| And while the PM had it easy enough navigating legalistic questions about Belizean sovereignty, it didn;t go as smoothly when we asked him about his government's latest defeat at the hands of the Ashcroft Alliance.
As we told you last week, the Government controlled company, Sunshine Holdings Limited, tried to convince Justice Courtney Abel to order the Ashcroft entities, Dean Boyce and the Trustees of the BTL Employees Trust to give them back part of the 114+ million dollars they collected as part of the half a billion-dollar settlement over BTL. Sunshine claimed that the Government wrongly paid compensation to the Alliance for 11 million shares in the telecoms company that were once assets of Sunshine, back when it was an Ashcroft company.
For 3 days, the two sides presented their case to the judge, and 2 hours after the end of the case, he delivered a oral judgement completely rejecting Sunshine's claim. That's a significant defeat for the Government because when they took over Sunshine, they, and by extension Belizean taxpayers, became liable for a 20 million-dollar investment loan that Sunshine made to purchase those shares.
So, Sunshine was attempting to get at least a part of the 114 million dollar compensation payment to pay off that debt. But, the Supreme Court will not entertain them in their attempt to force the Ashcroft Alliance to give back that money.
The Prime Minister told us that he hopes that Nestor Vasquez, the sole Director of Sunshine, will appeal this case:
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow - Prime Minister
"I will go further to what I said earlier and express the hope that Sunshine will appeal. Indeed, the liabilities for those, or the liability for those investment loans under the settlement remain with Sunshine and that is the entire burden of the Sunshine court application. Since the Ashcroft people collected the compensation for the acquisition of the BTL shares, which originally were held by Sunshine, they should be made at the very least to put Sunshine in funds to settle the liability for the investment funds. Clearly, Sunshine has lost that application before the Supreme Court but I am confident that there will be appeals launched."
So, did the Prime Minister and his legal team make another mistake by making a special carve out in the big BTL settlement for Sunshine and it's debt? We challenged the Prime Minister on that, and here's what he had to say:
Daniel Ortiz - Reporter
"Persons looking on ascribe blame specifically to you as one of the persons who negotiated the BTL settlement; that you should have paid attention to this particular detail to insulate the taxpayers from that investment loan debt."
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow - Prime Minister
"Whatever blames you or anyone else would wish to ascribe to me, I am able to deal with it. You can say, nobody can quarrel with you for that, that perhaps the agreement might have been far more tightly drawn so that the objective that I sought to achieve would have been placed beyond any possibility of challenge. That is not any opinion or conclusion that I would begrudge you but not only do we at least get back $10 million, the fact is you can't lose sight of the central consideration. Compensation was due and without my effort of trying to mitigate the burden of that compensation we would have had to pay everything, including the $10 million we got back. With respect to that assessment, it turned out to be significantly- extraordinarily so- significantly less than what the Ashcroft Alliance had claimed. The expectation certainly was that the compensation would have been far greater than it turned out to be. That alone was a tremendous victory for the people and government of Belize."
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