Kay Menzies Says New Act Will Make Tackling Corruption Systematic

Kay Menzies

The Prime Minister said last Thursday that the Government of Belize is not going to sign on to the Anti-Corruption Convention. According to the Prime Minister, signing on would create more layers of bureaucracy, besides there are mechanisms in the system to deal with corruption. But that is not going down well in many quarters. The Belize Progressive Party insists that the government should accede to the convention. Today, past President of the Chamber, Kay Menzies, addressed the urgency of signing the Convention.

Kay Menzies, Past President, Belize Chamber of Commerce and Industry

“Generally speaking, the Chamber has recognized and we’ve recognized because of all the issues we’ve been dealing with in trying to encourage tackling corruption; we’ve – as the President mentioned for more than a decade now, for several decades now, we have been tackling corruption in different ways. It has now occurred to us, and we’ve done considerable homework on it, that it is an imperative that we sign on to the U.N. Convention against Corruption. It doesn’t mean that it solves the problem, just the signature; it means that it allows us to tackle corruption in a more systematic way; that we can use systems to tackle the issue and clean it up. But let us understand that the Chamber has been for more than a decade been very serious about the issue of corruption generally. This is what we are now introducing as one of the ways to begin to solve the problem. Not the solution; but the beginning of the solution.”