NEWCO wants $9 million; PM says lawyer will respond

We reported last week that the consortium of companies called NEWCO sent out a press release revealing that it was taking civil action to collect its nine million dollar arbitration settlement. At a press conference on Wednesday, responding to the release, Prime Minister Dean Barrow said that they haven’t paid NEWCO because the two parties have been unable to agree on how to disburse the money. Barrow says government has until February ninth to respond to the motion filed in the Washington court and that they have secured a lawyer from a firm in the U.S. to deal with the matter.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“We haven’t paid for a number of reasons; one being that it is a lot of money to find and they have rejected the idea of payment by installments. But we also haven’t paid because we are legitimately of the view that the interest did not start to accrue when NEWCO said it did and that’s a tremendous financial significance. Secondly, we believe that because NEWCO is and was at all times a Belize company and took the arbitration proceedings as a Belize company, that we ought to pay them in Belize dollars and avoid the foreign exchange drain if we can. We’ve obtained an injunction from the Belize courts saying that until this matter of whether NEWCO is to pay in Belize dollars and how much interest has accrued is resolved, NEWCO is to take no further action. The attorney we hired in the states will take that to the district court in Washington and use that to attempt to get a stay on NEWCO’s enforcement action.”

G.O.B. has raised two million of the nine million dollar settlement. The funds came from the increase in departure tax.