Opposition Leader Asserts G.O.B. Spent $300 Thousand on Legal Opinions

Shyne "Moses" Barrow

Last night, we showed you the Prime Minister’s response to questions about his administration’s decision to seek a second legal opinion from Senior Counsel Douglas Mendes on the validity of the Definitive Agreement. Tonight, the Leader of the Opposition is still pressing the Government of Belize on the matter. He says that he still cannot comprehend why the Briceño administration would go beyond the legal opinion of King’s Counsel Ben Juratowitch, because Juratowitch happens to be Belize’s lead counsel in its case against Guatemala at the I.C.J. Furthermore, the Opposition Leader is putting a dollar figure to the value of the legal services provided by both esteemed legal minds. He asserts that the numbers he has received comes from a trusted source.

Shyne “Moses” Barrow, Leader of the Opposition

“So there are two legal opinions from Consul Mendez and King’s Consul Juratowitch. As I said, the one from Juratowitch, I understand, is about a hundred thousand U.S., Juratowitch, who is our ICJ lawyer, and Mendez is about fifty thousand, so a total of three hundred thousand spent on legal opinions. I cannot comprehend or fathom why the prime minister and his government would want to go beyond Juratowitch, who is an esteemed preeminent international lawyer that is defending our territorial integrity. So if we don’t have confidence in him, if the government doesn’t have confidence in him, then something is terribly wrong. But the opposition maintains that the intent of the prime minister was always to get the definitive agreement passed into law as was, as much as they try to blame everything on Erwin Contreras and try to all of the allegations at the feet of the UDP. It is abundantly clear, this idea that it was just taken to Cabinet, uh, just as a perfunctory, just as a matter of disclosing to them. We know the PUP Briceño administration behavior, and if they truly believed that this was UDP corruption, and they wanted nothing to do with it that would have been a press conference immediately upon discovering that definitive agreement,  blasting the UDP, blasting minister Contreras, and ripping up the definitive agreement then and there.”