PM’s ex-wife collects $1.2 million from government

And it was no secret that attorney Lois Young has been representing the government in many high profile cases. Young is estimated to have represented government in over thirty cases since March of 2008. This morning in a glaring headline the opposition newspaper, Belize Times, reported that over fifteen payments were made in the name of Lois Young from the Ministry of Finance during the period of March fourteenth 2008 to June fifteenth 2009. The payments range from a few thousand dollars to very large amounts. According to the information also made available to News Five, in August of 2008 she reportedly received two payments of over eighty thousand dollars each. And in December and January she received over one hundred thousand dollars in each month. In February of 2009, according to the information received, she received two payments; the first for over twenty-eight thousand dollars and the second a staggering five hundred and eighty-three thousand plus. That’s over half a million dollars for that month alone. In total by June 2009, Young had been paid one point two million dollars. And according to inside sources, this figure may not include the case of the millions of dollars from Venezuela in which Young was attorney for the government. If you recall, the country was without a Solicitor General for a year until the post was filled last month by Guyanese born attorney Oscar Ramjeet. And on May thirteenth, Prime Minister Barrow had this to say:

Prime Minister Dean Barrow (May 13, 2009)
“Some of the people who are interested don’t appear to us to fit the bill and there’s always the question of the package. Nobody in Belize wants to do it because again the good lawyers are all in private practice and they make too much money. So we clearly are looking at somebody from abroad, but even there if you’re not—we don’t pay very well. Our salary rates in the public service of Belize aren’t particularly high. So there is that kind of a deterrent but we might have to do a little something extra because we must get a Solicitor General.”