Hyde defends sister, blasts Barrow
This morning, flanked by men and women he says are employees of Green Patch Company, and armed with paperwork: receipts of equipment purchased and maintained, Minister of Education Cordel Hyde came to his sister’s defence. According to Hyde, they have the documents and the people to prove they worked for every cent they collected.
Cordel Hyde, Minister of Education
“First of all, the accusation is that the Green Patch Company is an illegitimate company that it never existed. But Barrow knows that in order to establish a business account at the bank, you have to have registration in order to establish that. So he’s been disingenuous, in fact I dare say he’s been lyad. The company was established for the sole purpose of providing employment to our young people in Lake Independence, and also for us to upkeep the schools in Belize City.”
Janelle Chanona
“What do you say to the attacks, that…where then is he getting this information or how is he getting confused?”
Cordel Hyde
“Well I’m not distracted by where he is getting the information, and I’m not really that he is confused. I think he’s deliberately trying to manipulate the information that he has for his political purposes, this being five days, six days before the election. I think it’s just a ploy by him to try to garner votes. But for me, I’m in the political kitchen so I can stand the heat, but I think that it was really petty of him, really advantageous of him to go after a defenceless woman. In the streets they would call Barrow a punk you know, but we are on television and we will just say that he was really unfair.”
Janelle Chanona
“Going after your sister you mean.”
Cordel Hyde
“Yeah. She was the treasurer of the Lake Independence Committee. And so she was the person that was dealing with the disbursements of the payments and all that. And for that matter, seven thousand, five hundred dollars a month could not even upkeep this program. We had to close down the program because we just did not have enough money to sustain it. At any one point in time, we had ten persons working and you could go to any of the schools them, even the same Queen’s Square that he speaks about, you can go there because the principal used to call our offices regularly for the boys to go there to clean to schools. You can talk to Gwen Liz, Sadie Vernon, Trinity Methodist, Wesley Upper School, any of these schools.”
Because of an afternoon holiday in Belize City, contacting representatives from the schools proved difficult. However, one principal, Enita Lambey Castillo of Gwen Lizarraga High School, told News 5 that over the course of the school term 2000-2001, employees from Green Patch visited the campus twice a month to do yard maintenance.
