High Court Judge Quashes Magistrate’s Ruling in C.I.B. Money Seizure Case
Today in the High Court of Belize, Justice Patricia Farnese handed down a decision, following a hearing in a matter involving businessman Kevin Xin, a director and shareholder of Caribbean International Brewery, the bottlers of Mine Beer. On October third of last year, a raid was carried out at the C.I.B. compound in Carmelita Village by a police inspector assigned to the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Unit. This was under a warrant granted by Magistrate Deborah Rogers. During the operation, a large sum of cash was seized and the Financial Intelligence Unit was subsequently called in. Along with the confiscation of money, charges were also brought in relation to immigration offenses. Those matters were heard and dispensed with in the lower court in the Orange Walk jurisdiction. Subsequently, an application was brought before the High Court challenging the magistrate’s decision in respect of the seizure of the money, roughly three million Belize dollars. In Justice Farnese’s decision, the court ruled that the magistrate acted beyond her legal capacity when she mandated the detention of the cash that was seized from C.I.B. Late this evening, Senior Counsel Dean Barrow, who represents Kevin Xin and C.I.B., spoke with News Five by phone.
On the phone: Dean Barrow
On the phone: Dean Barrow, SC, Attorney-at-law
“Well they got the judgment of the High Court by Justice Farnese in the judicial review application that we had made. Remember that while we had been, in fact, laboring in the Magistrate’s Court to get the magistrate to give back the money we had meantime filed an application for judicial review, submitting that, in fact, all the orders that the magistrate had made and her entire procedure, everything was wrong. So we got back the money, as you know, from the magistrate by virtue of appearing in front of her in that separate set of proceedings. That happened about a month ago, five [or] six weeks, whatever. But today, the judgment came out, the decision came out in the judicial review proceedings and in fact the judge has found, and I will cut straight to the case, that we are correct, that are claim is made out and, among other things, granted an order of certiorari to quash Civil Action 368 of 2020 and all rulings and all orders made therein. So that’s Civil Action 368 of 2020 was the proceeding before the magistrate. The FIU’s application was before the magistrate, so that entire proceeding has been quashed and all the rulings and orders made in the course of that proceeding by the magistrate has been struck down by the High Court.”
