Government’s Role in Facilitating Sale Explained

Dean Barrow

P.M. Barrow, during his press conference this afternoon, explained government’s legal role in facilitating the sale of FCIB’s assets to Heritage Bank.  To circumvent the passage of the Vesting Act, he says, would mean that the process would be unnecessarily lengthened to include each individual shareholder.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“All government is doing in passing the Vesting Act is to facilitate the transfer of the assets. If we didn’t do this…and there is precedent when Ashcroft bought royal bank of Canada; when FCIB bought Barclay’s Bank; when Scotia Belize bought out Scotia Bank…on each occasion, government—and there were different administrations on each of those occasions—passed a Vesting Act. If you don’t do that, the transfer of the securities with respect to every single mortgage would have to be laboriously processed at the registry one by one. So all we are doing is facilitating this process so that there are no slippages. To make the point, if we even decided no we are not going to pass any Vesting Act, the deal would still go through, except that there would have to be this individual processing of the security transfers. Our obligation is first and foremost to the depositors, to the customers of FCIB.”

The Vesting Act, along with the B.T.L. settlement, is on the agenda for Tuesday’s house meeting. We’ll have the full details on what happens in the House on Tuesday’s newscast.