U.D.P. Criticizes Briceño Administration Over S.S.B. Loan
The United Democratic Party is chiding the Briceño administration for entering into a loan agreement with the Social Security Board for the construction of a pair of administration buildings to be erected on Lake Independence Boulevard. On September twenty-second, S.S.B. unveiled an investment project for the development of a Public Administration Campus adjacent to the Eleanor Hall Building. The funds for the project will come from a public private partnership involving the Government of Belize. The present government, when in opposition a few years ago, criticized the Barrow administration for its use of PetroCaribe funds for the Eleanor Hall Building which was described at the time as unnecessary. Today, the U.D.P. decried the project which it says will saddle Belizean taxpayers for the next thirty years.
Shyne Barrow, Leader of the Opposition
“This is a nightmare, a nightmare from Briceño Street and the script could not have been written to be more frightening than it is now because when you look at the players involved in the looting of the social security funds that belong to the Belizean people that should be there for the Belizean people when they retire, so that they can have something to sustain them. When you look at the players that were involved, it’s the same names. So explain to me now how this government is borrowing forty million dollars from the taxpayers social security financing to build a building that they said we didn’t even need the first building. Now we need two more buildings because it is forty million or forty change. There was a twenty million that they put out but dehn fraid fi tell yoh bout the next twenty million. Then we just saw another six point five million that was gazetted. I know that was for another crony, and all of this five months before the municipal elections. We have to call it for what it is. It is corruption, it is looting of the tax payers dollars in the context, in the backdrop of the highest inflation and cost of living that we have ever seen.”