Leader of the Opposition and Former P.M. says no secret agreement

Said Musa

As we’ve told you, the agreement in the spotlight was signed by Said Musa and Francis Fonseca in 2005, and extended B.I.S.L.’s contract to 2020. The legality of that document will weigh heavily in what is sure to be protracted litigation. And perhaps in early preparation, the Prime Minister has gone to great lengths to refer to the agreement as secret. At this morning’s press conference, PM Barrow had his say…but today so did the men who signed the agreement back in 2005. Neither of them minced their words.

Said Musa, Former Prime Minister

“This started from back in the early nineties and it was extended a couple times in fact and the recent one signed in 2005; that thing was cleared by senior public officers in the attorney general’s ministry as well as in the ministry of finance. So I would like to go back into the records to check, but I am sure this matter was discussed by the members of the cabinet. So to talk about secret agreement, this is a typical Barrow line. He’s always talking about secret agreements whenever he wants to carry out his scheme of nationalizing things. That’s what’s going on here again.”

Francis Fonseca, Former Attorney General

Francis Fonseca

“It’s absolute nonsense, absolute nonsense. The press conference this morning was Dean Barrow at his best performer on stage, the circus clown at the town fair…that is him at his best trying to create a diversion. This is a prime minister presiding over a government that is in crisis reeling from one scandal to the next and whenever his back is against the wall he tries to come up with some bogus issue to try to divert attention away from the real challenges facing Belize and the real problems eating away at his government which are corruption and nepotism and all of the very serious examples of incompetence that are facing his government. So let’s be very clear of what took place this morning…that was exactly what it was, a show. To the substantive issue of disagreement, it was a letter of agreement…this was an old agreement that dates back to 1993—some ten years before I became a member of parliament. But when this matter came up—and this is a matter that was discussed in cabinet and I recall that discussion quite clearly—it was a discussion about the performance of the company, how it had been doing and generally the discussion that was generated demonstrated that the company was doing well; it had served Belize well. It was a company that we must understand, and this started back in 1993, that really created a new industry in Belize; it created a new offshore financial service industry in Belize, an industry that never existed before. So it was a new opportunity for Belize to earn revenue, a new opportunity for us to create employment for our people, a new opportunity to create a stronger investment climate in Belize. And this agreement of 2005 was an extension, a show of confidence if you like in that performance. And the discussions, I remember the discussions very well because I had on my had, two hats—the hat of the Attorney General, but also the hat of Minister of Education—because we even talked about the one point five million U.S. dollars that was being paid, three million dollars, being paid into the government coffers; that one of the things that we would like to do with that money was to build some additional classrooms in different parts of the country and I remember having a list of classrooms that we wanted to build both in the Toledo district and the Stann Creek district and a few I believe in rural Belize. And advancing that argument to the cabinet about how those funds can be used. So this nonsense about it being a secret agreement is just that…absolute nonsense by a very mischievous prime minister who is seeking to distract the Belizean people. [There is] nothing secret about it and absolutely nothing illegal about it. This thing was vetted by the solicitor general, it was vetted by the office of the attorney general, it was vetted by the public officers at the Ministry of Finance and the minister of finance, the prime minister at the time obviously approved it.”