Nineteen Million Petrocaribe Dollars to be Used for Initial B.T.L. Payment

Dean Barrow

Forty-eight million U.S. dollars settles the BCB award. PM was also clear that B.T.L. will eventually take responsibility for the payment. The government will make the initially payment and some nineteen million dollars will come from the Petrocaribe to do so.  

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“It is now forty-eight million U.S.  The Dunkeld people also provoked arbitration proceedings and that hearing was concluded around Easter time of this year and we are still awaiting a ruling there.  That is only about compensation.  With the BCB we used arbitration to challenge the legality of the loan and so there was that huge legal fight.  In terms of Dunkeld it is a matter of our experts saying that this is the value of the company or the value of the shares at the time of acquisition and their legal experts saying something completely different.  So, against that backdrop this is where we are: in order to settle this matter, to have the former shareholders acknowledge once and for all that B.T.L. is now and forevermore the property of the government and people of Belize, we will pay the award that the tribunal issued in the BCB matter.  In other words, we will not any longer seek to skip and jump and dodge and run and postpone the inevitable for another day while interest continues to run.  So we will pay that forty-eight million U.S. dollars and settle the BCB award. So forty-eight point five million dollars will be raised by way of government’s issue of these treasury notes.  Central Bank naturally buys the treasury notes and gives us the forty-eight million dollars on sales and there is a huge, there’ll be a queue.  Liquidity is such, market conditions are such that there will be a queue for people who would want to buy in turn the treasury notes from the Central Bank.  The good B.T.L. will service those treasury notes so in terms of that forty-eight million dollars, it costs the government nothing, not even immediately.  Central Bank gives us the money, they on sell in the normal course then it is our obligation to service the interest to those who have bought the notes and who hold the notes. Since it is ultimately for B.T.L., they are finding ten million dollars in cash and so that will be used to pay a portion of the balance.  Fifteen million dollars in dividends that B.T.L. has for government that were frozen by the CCJ will be used to add to that ten million.  So we’re getting twenty-five from B.T.L., ten of which is their own money, fifteen of which belongs to us and then the additional nineteen million or so, we’re getting from, you guessed it, Petrocaribe.”