Who Will Take Care of Deputy PM Patrick Faber’s Government Vehicle?

Deputy Prime Minister Patrick Faber’s assigned vehicle, a 2013 Toyota Prado, was plunged into the Caribbean Sea near Marine Parade by an unknown driver on August fourteenth.  The account given by the Minister of Education a day later was that the vehicle was stolen from his girlfriend’s house near mile four on the George Price Highway that Sunday evening and taken for a joyride before being driven into the drink.  This morning during the not-so-heated moment of the House Meeting, Leader of the Opposition John Briceño asked Prime Minister Barrow about the expenses related to the damaged vehicle.

John Briceño

John Briceño, Leader of the Opposition

“Will the Right Honorable Prime Minister confirm to this honorable house, now that the Deputy Prime Minister has stated in a press conference on Monday fifteenth August, 2016; that his government issued vehicle was alleged stolen on Sunday, August fourteenth 2016 and stated that he paid out of his personally money, forty thousand dollars towards the purchase of the Land Cruiser. Whether the Deputy Prime Minister and honorable member for Collet has paid this forty thousand dollars and so when he made such payment.”

Dean Barrow

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“Mister Speaker, I got an email from the Financial Secretary on this matter this morning. I hadn’t had a chance to print it and now it is not coming up on my phone so I am going from memory. It was in 2013, right at the start of the year, that the government placed an order with Belize Diesel and Equipment for a vehicle for the then Minister of Education. In keeping with government’s effort to put a cap on the amount that we were prepared to spend on ministerial vehicles, we indicated that the vehicle should cost government no more than ninety thousand dollars. When the vehicle was going to be delivered, it turned out that the vehicle was actually going to cost a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars.  Government and the minister perfectly understood and accepted this, paid the ninety thousand, which the minister knew was our cap. He paid the difference between the ninety and the one-twenty-eight. I don’t know if there were additional charges that might have made it forty rather than thirty-eight. But from our records, certainly not less than thirty-eight thousand dollars was paid by the minister. The vehicle was thereafter registered in the name of the government of Belize. So yes, and if you want to know where he got the money from to pay; he got a salary advancement from government to pay the additional monies, which salary advance he is just about completely repaid.”