Belize Company & Corporate Affairs Registry to Become a Statutory Body

Dean Flowers

The Public Service Union is to meet with the legal and judicial service officers to determine the course of action that they may want to take to challenge what President Flowers describes as “dictatorial behaviour” by the Briceño administration. But, there is another issue. President Dean Flowers says that the union has similarly been informed that the Belize Company and Corporate Affairs Registry is being re-classified as a statutory body effective March of this year. Flowers breaks down its implications.

Dean Flowers, President, Public Service Union

“Now if you move a government department into another statutory body that cannot sustain itself because I dare this administration or the former administration to show me the statutory body or the department that has been statutorized and can stand on its own. We continue to pump millions and millions of dollars into these statutory bodies and without any accountability. I have written to the government, asking for financial statements for all these statutory boards that we are subsidizing. The abuse that we see in the public service is the same kind of abuse and maybe more in those statutory bodies and there is absolutely no accountability and we continue to pump subventions and subsidies into then. Now here we go, wanting to statutorize another government department and no consultation with the workers’ representative. No open consultation with the workers so we can hear from them, we can give their suggestion so that we can ease their fears that their conditions of service, their benefits will not be lost. What is it that we can negotiate on their behalf so that as they transition into this new statutory body that they go in or choose to leave, if they are not comfortable. I mean, you continue to operate into this dictatorial manner.”