$2.2M for Super Bond Legal and Consultation Fees

Mark Lizarraga

On Wednesday, the Senate approved the spending of two point two million dollars to cover the legal and consultation fees attached to the consent solicitation process for the deferral of interest on payments on the super bond payments.  The government successfully managed to convince bondholders to capitalize interest payments, due to the economic downturn triggered by COVID-19. Senator Mark Lizarraga pointed out that little information was provided with regards to this supplementary appropriation and questioned who is being paid the two million dollars in legal fees. 

Mark Lizarraga, Senator for Private Sector

“It would have been nice Mister President in an effort to be fully transparent to know who receive the legal fees because again at a time like this two million dollars is not a drop in the bucket. We have to be very careful of the resources that we have and how we expend them. Was there a process to select the lowest bidder for the legal fees? I don’t know. We have seen tens of millions of dollars disbursed in this house for legal fees and there have been many questions that have arisen because of our expending those fees. And I think that as we move along through this crisis, health and financial crisis. We have a responsibility to ensure again that we get full bank for our buck. Our recourse are extremely scarce and two point two million dollars is a lot of money. So I would like to request quite frankly from the financial secretary that we be provided with those details so that we can support and say in fact there was no alternative, in fact we did try to save. So with your permission Mister President I suggest that we ask the Financial Secretary to provide us with a breakdown of those fees.”