Correspondent Banking Crisis – Opposition Says G.O.B. Should Act Immediately

Kareem Musa

Prime Minister Dean Barrow has called the loss of correspondent bank relationships an existential threat and a potentially huge crisis. And undoubtedly, if not resolved the implications are many and significant – from what would be an inability to purchase goods and services from the U.S.  In a recent interview, Barrow indicated that he is setting up interviews with federal entities and stakeholders in Washington as a matter of urgency.  Today, in a House meeting, which was the shortest and least incendiary in our mental archives of such sessions, Caribbean Shores Area Representative Kareem Musa called on the Prime Minister to act with all haste.

Kareem Musa, Area Representative, Caribbean Shores

“It is no longer possible to do business, and I am speaking, Mr. Speaker, in particular to the purchase of goods and services from the United States and elsewhere. I am speaking about the use of credit cards. I am speaking about remittances that come home to our Belizean families from abroad. That is the effect that it has had on our economy, a terrible effect. And we need Mr. Speaker for this issue to be addressed not only in Belize but on the world stage. We need to lobby, Mr. Speaker.  Right before elections we saw the Belize Bank being the first Belizean bank to be affected…now we hear that other banks are falling in line, other banks are being blacklisted. It is soon going to be impossible for us to do business, and we need to take this matter very seriously because it is going to affect our economy.”

Dean Barrow

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“You know he started off by saying you can’t do business, you can’t import, and then just before the end he says if this continues we will not be able to do business. But he had already said that business had stopped. In other words Mr. Speaker right at the start of his speech he exaggerated. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he lied. I wonder where you got that trait from…that ‘liadness.’ I don’t know if it’s a function of youth to all of a sudden be struck by these epiphanies, to encounter these startling revelations with respect to matters that have been obvious and in plain sight for long before the so-called revelation overtakes in this case the member for Caribbean Shores. To say that we need to treat it with urgency, to say that we need to lobby is to state the obvious and to in fact get his tenses mixed up. It’s not that we need to start to lobby. It is that in fact we have already started to lobby.”