Government looks ahead following victory in court
Still high from government’s resounding legal victory in Miami, Ministers Godfrey Smith and Francis Fonseca were determined not to let the news of an appeal by Jeffrey Prosser dampen G.O.B.’s good mood. During the weekly press briefing, the Cabinet members maintained that they are not surprised at Prosser’s decision.
Godfrey Smith, Minister of Information
“His modus operandi is to engage in these long drawn out legal manoeuvrings. If he could drag it out ad infinitum he probably would. The government is obliged, it’s in its best interest, and that of the government and people of Belize, to take legal steps to ensure that we put a stop to those legal manoeuvrings as much as possible. And the bill that was passed in the House the other day is designed to put us in a position to be able to deal with that if Prosser keeps insisting, wrongly in our view, that he is entitled to it when we are asserting that he isn’t.”
Francis Fonseca, Attorney General
“It is Mr. Prosser, and that is the finding of the judge, it is Mr. Prosser as I.C.C. and Belize Telecom, which defaulted on its obligations under the agreement. So there is no question of feeling sorry for Mr. Prosser and saying, what’s going to happen to Mr. Prosser, is he going to back away? The fact is that he had an opportunity with an agreement. If he had made good on the payment, we would not be here today, we would have been moving forward with B.T.L. He was unable to make that payment, he defaulted on it and as a businessperson he has to suffer the economic consequences of that.”
Godfrey Smith
“It is a sigh of relief; it’s certainly not celebratory. We still have a lot of work to do. Did we stick out our neck too far with Prosser? Clearly we did.”
According to Smith, while the government does intend to dispose of its thirty-seven point five percent of B.T.L.’s shares; that is twelve percent to Ecom, five percent to the Belizean public, and twenty percent to a workers’ trust, that will not happen until several technical requirements have been completed, including a meeting of B.T.L.’s board of directors.
But while the substantive case at the District Court level is closed, there is still an ongoing appeal regarding the hefty fifty thousand U.S. dollar per day contempt fine that was imposed by Judge Ursula Ungaro-Benages during the trial. This afternoon, Attorney General Francis Fonseca said that, based on the advice of the U.S. defence team, Belize may be excused from paying.
Francis Fonseca
“While they will discuss that issue, obviously with the judge, and take that matter through the proper channels to dispose of it, their own legal understanding of the issues is that because the contempt fine flowed from that preliminary injunction of March eleventh, and that preliminary injunction has now been vacated, completely vacated, there is therefore no root for that contempt fine to continue to be in force and of effect. So they see it as falling aside. And Belize at the end of the day, they believe, will not have to pay any fine, but that is a decision that will have to follow its proper course.”
In another piece of good news for Belmopan, attorneys for the U.S. government yesterday notified the Court of Appeal in Atlanta that they will be filing a “friend of the court” brief in support of G.O.B.’s efforts to overturn the contempt fine. The State Department is concerned that the imposition of monetary sanctions against foreign governments by a U.S. court could result in similar action against the United States abroad.
