B.E.L. holds AGM tonight
Belize Electricity Limited has completed it’s financial year and is hosting its annual general meeting tonight at the Princess Hotel. The meeting starts at seven thirty and the company’s CEO, Lynn Young, is happy to report to shareholders that B.E.L. has experienced a bright year despite the hurricane and recent blackouts.
Lynn Young, CEO, B.E.L.
“This year we’ve seen modest improvement in our operations. We’ve moved on net income from ten million to ten point seven million dollars. And we’ve done this in the face of rising oil prices, of being hit by a hurricane and giving a decrease in rates last year. So we think it’s quite an achievement and we’ll also be reporting on operations, some of the things we’ve done through the year to try and improve services to customers. What has been the result so far and what we expect to do as we move forward. And of course we’ll be talking about our efforts to do more generation, especially the Chalillo project which is on everybody’s mind especially after the recent events with Mexico.”
Jose Sanchez
“How has the sale of debentures been going?”
Lynn Young
“The sale of debentures have been going pretty good. We’ve raised over thirteen million dollars already. We’ve had quite a few requests because the period we had it opened for was three weeks and the Easter holiday came during those three weeks and quite a few subscriptions are still coming in now. I believe at the end of the day we will raise between fifteen and twenty million dollars to put into our capital programme.”
Jose Sanchez
“What kind of returns can shareholders see at the meeting tonight?”
Lynn Young
“What we have done at the last general meeting, we changed our policy and starting paying dividends on a quarterly basis. So shareholders have been giving dividends and during the course of last year, we paid twenty cents per share. It was five cents each quarter and for this year we’ve paid a five-cent dividend this quarter. That amounts on a two dollar share to twenty cents per share that’s a ten percent return.”
Young says debentures are fixed at nine and a half percent interest, which is paid quarterly and the deadline to purchase them has been extended to May eighth.
