Why Didn’t Government Challenge Validity of Accommodation Agreement?

Eamon Courtenay

The Prime Minister has vilified the Accommodation Agreement signed between B.T.L. and the P.U.P. administration of 2005. In fact, it’s been a main platform of every government campaign since 2008. But Courtenay says that propaganda aside, the incredible thing is that G.O.B. has never once challenged the validity of the agreement in Court and that’s nothing less than a dereliction of its duty.

Eamon Courtenay, Senator, People’s United Party

“The Accommodation Agreement has never been challenged by the government. The government has never gone to Court to say that this document is unlawful. If that was the document that was the problem, the proper thing to do was to go to Court and to seek to have it declared unlawful. Now what we have is an arbitral tribunal that says it is valid, and another arbitral tribunal that is saying there is a value between two hundred to three hundred million dollars that is attributed to that Accommodation Agreement. It is passing strange that there are two cases – one brought by the ACB and Senator Hulse and another brought by the PUC challenging the Accommodation Agreement. These were filed in March 2009 and those two cases have never come to trial. The government has not allowed those cases to come to trial. If those cases had been tried you would have had a judgment by 2010 and it would have said the Accommodation Agreement is either valid or it is not valid. If it was held to be unlawful, then this two hundred to three hundred million that we are paying for the Accommodation Agreement, we wouldn’t have to pay. So I am saying that the way the government has gone about this has been negligent, has been in dereliction of duty and the surrender in Miami by the Prime Minister to all the demands of the Ashcroft Group of Companies I think is really beyond anything that the Belizean people should accept.”