Canadian company buys additional B.E.L. shares

On Monday night’s newscast we reported that while government had sold the bulk of its shares in Belize Electricity Limited to a Canadian company, Fortis Incorporated, it was also likely that Fortis would buy the additional block of shares owned by Carlisle Holdings, a company controlled by Ambassador Michael Ashcroft. So said so done. Today News Five confirmed that Fortis had indeed purchased all the Carlisle shares and as a result now owns a controlling sixty-three percent of B.E.L. The new lineup on the company’s board has Fortis CEO Stans Marshall and four other Canadian appointees while the Belize government keeps Robert Usher as Chairman. The Social Security Board retains Yasin Shoman and Karl Menzies to look after its twenty-five percent interest while the remaining smaller Belizean shareholders, who as a group own around twelve percent of B.E.L.’s shares, are entitled to appoint one additional member to the board. Fortis Incorporated, based in the Eastern Canadian province of Newfoundland, has assets of over a billion US dollars and investments in six utility companies. Fortis paid Carlisle just under eight million US dollars for the shares which were sold at the same price as government’s: around two dollars and seventy-five cents Belize per share. Carlisle originally purchased the shares at two dollars each some seven years ago, realizing a modest annual return of around five percent.