Litigation over Telemedia continues

Senior Counsel Godfrey Smith is taking on Prime Minister Dean Barrow. It’s not the usual challenge over politics which he writes in his blog, Flashpoint; it’s about legal and weighty matters. At a press conference billed as his state of the nation Barrow contracted earlier statements that he expected that the economy would rebound in the next financial year. Well, now that the numbers have been crunched, the PM, has a change of heart and on Wednesday he said the contrary, that in fact the new financial year would be the government’s worst ever.  But that is not the only issue that the Prime Minister has taken a three hundred and sixty degrees turn. In fact, with the economy coming to a grinding halt, the PM has still not been able to make any progress on the issue of Telemedia, the once profitable telephone company that he expropriated last August. At the time Barrow said it would end litigation but since then the opposite has happened. So who does the PM blame?  That would be the attorneys for the previous owners who he claims are keeping back the re-privatization. News Five today raised the issue with attorney Godfrey Smith.

Godfrey Smith, Attorney for Dean Boyce

“That is absolutely not the position. I suppose the question is motivated by a statement coming from the Prime Minister that attorneys were holding up the re-privatization, but obviously that is not the case.  When the Prime Minister led the charge for the take-over, the nationalization of Telemedia, perhaps the first justification he gave for doing so was to bring an end to all the litigation between Telemedia and the Government of Belize.  Obviously, quite the reverse has happened so I find it quite comical as well as nonsensical for the Prime Minister to now say that it is the litigation surrounding his government’s nationalization of Telemedia that’s preventing him from putting it out back for sale into the hands of the Belizean people when the justification for doing so was to bring an end to litigation.  That’s obviously not the case.  It suggests, certainly to me that either there was not deep thought given to the nationalization if you’re going to think that the purpose of nationalization is to end litigation and quite the opposite happens, it suggests that either you didn’t think it through or you did it hoping that litigation would be coming out of it. And again there is a completely separate and parallel process involved here, which is the process of sitting at the negotiating table with shareholders whose shares were compulsorily acquired and negotiating for a compensation package.  The very piece of legislation, the amendment to the Telecommunications Act, which empowered the government to nationalize Telemedia if it so wished, also required that without delay there would be a negotiation process for compensating the shareholders.  Obviously if the entity I represent is given a proposal or package that it is happy with that would bring an end to litigation and that obviously has not been addressed at all.  The compulsory acquisition, the take-over, took place on twenty-fourth/twenty-fifth August of last year.  The Prime Minister said that he thought that within a year they would be able to put it back on the market for sale and neither of two things has happened.  Neither has there been a negotiation for compensation and obviously the government is not in a position to put it back for sale to the Belizean people or anyone else for that matter.”