More details emerge in loan controversy
More details have surfaced in the case of a bankrupt Belize-based investment company and a loan it allegedly made to Agriculture Minister Russel “Chiste” Garcia. As we reported yesterday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered Swiss Trade and Commerce Trust Limited and its owners, Lloyd Winburn and Eddie Blackwell, to repay over nine million U.S. dollars to investors who had been defrauded. Among the company’s investments, according to the Wall Street Journal, was a U.S. forty thousand dollar loan to the Minister of Agriculture to build a house. In explaining the deal to News Five Chiste said the money was not a loan, that the company built a house for him in Dangriga, which he was to pay for upon its completion. The house never was finished according to plan and the parties disagreed as to how much of the ninety six thousand Belize dollar price should be paid. In a telephone interview the Minister told us he had already paid between sixty and seventy thousand dollars to the company through its lawyer Oscar Sabido. A check today with Sabido revealed that Chiste had indeed paid him, but only a total of forty two thousand, five hundred dollars. News Five’s investigations revealed that a further ten thousand was paid to Swiss Trade’s successor company after it was put into receivership. This brings the total paid by the Minister to fifty two thousand, five hundred. Negotiations with the contractor apparently resulted in the price of the house being reduced by fifteen percent to eighty two thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars, thus leaving Chiste with a debt of around thirty thousand dollars. According to his lawyer, Lionel Welch, Garcia is now in the process of paying off that remaining balance. As for whether the money for the house was in fact a loan Welch described the document as a “mixture” of a loan and construction contract and that not a cent ever went into his client’s hands. The contractor who got the money, Welch said, was really a subsidiary of Swiss Trade, so if there was any loan it was in fact from the company to itself. Other lawyers who have seen the document, however, say that it is clearly a loan. The nature of the deal is of more than just academic interest as the loan, if that’s what it was, has not been listed on the financial declaration form required of all members of the National Assembly and top government officials. The purpose of the disclosure law is precisely to reveal any potential conflict of interest by political leaders in connection with those whose affairs they must regulate. Meanwhile, unreported by the Wall Street Journal, was the progress being made in winding up the defunct investment company’s affairs. Several million dollars worth of assets have been sold, including an office complex at the Boom cutoff and a shrimp farm near Dangriga. The proceeds from these sales, along with the thirty thousand dollars due from Chiste, will go toward giving the company’s defrauded investors at least some portion of their money back. The whereabouts of Winburn and Blackwell are currently unknown although former associates in Belize believe they are living in Mexico.
