PM’s Independence Speech also troublesome to investors
There was another caution about investor confidence in Belize. It is titled “A new kind of debt management” which rose not out of any action taken by government but rather from the lips of Prime Minister Barrow as he gave his Independence Day address in the capital on September twenty-first. News Five asked Ross, what in the PM’s Independence Day speech sounded an alarm to current and potential investors.
Jose Sanchez
“You also made mention of the Prime Minister’s Independence Day Speech, what was it about it that caught your attention?”
Carl Ross, Ph.D., Managing Director of Investments, Oppenheimer (Via Phone)
“Well from the point of view from the people who hold the bonds, bondholders and Oppenheimer is not a bondholder, we deal in bonds but we are not bondholders. But bondholders get very nervous ok, when they see a reference to a lack of a willingness to pay obligations or lack of a willingness to honour those obligations or some source of suggestion that the debt is too onerous.”
Dean Barrow, Prime Minister (File: September 21st, 2009)
“Certainly in terms of the economy, our present challenges loom at least as large as at any other time during our post independence existence. A peculiar combination of world circumstances, natural disasters, and the legacy from insane commercial borrowing and crony political spending has resulted now in national problems of unprecedented scale and circumference. Now it is clear that the straightened economic circumstances in which this country finds itself is owed in part to the transgressions of rich club nations. But it is equally true that our problems have been terribly exacerbated by local sins, by the rot of the pre-2008 era. Exhibit one is of course the poisoned chalice of that one point one billion dollar super bond. That is what is raiding our recurrent revenues, that is what is crippling our cash flow, stifling our fiscal place, and ripping from our hands the tools to deliver the goods and services to the people of this country.”
Doctor Cark Ross
“You have to be very careful when you make comments that refer to the debt being a stranglehold on the economy and taken by the previous government with the possible implication that as the current government you’re not going to honour these obligations made by the previous government. It was the tone and I realize this was the Independence Day speech and I realize the politics in Belize are fired up right now. But the tone of comments like that could be misinterpreted by foreign creditors as a lack or willingness or ability to pay the obligations.”
