B.T.L. employees were negotiating for trustee before takeover

On Friday the B.T.L. Employees Trust launched a constitutional motion challenging the expropriation of Telemedia. The Employees Trust held twenty-two percent shares in Telemedia prior to the nationalization of the telephone company. The value of the Telemedia has been estimated at three hundred million US dollars. And the Trust’s attorney, Godfrey Smith, says that the value of the Employees Trust is in the range of one hundred to one hundred and thirty million dollars. On Tuesday, Smith sat down with News Five and discussed the merits of the case. The shares were initially bought through loan arrangements, and even after those loans would be paid in full, there is likely to be a substantial amount of money for the B.T.L. employees. Smith names the Trustees as Dean Boyce and Keith Arnold, and says that the employees were negotiating to name a representative as a trustee prior to the nationalization of Telemedia.

Jose Sanchez
“I know the union rep was saying that they were seeking representation on the trust how has that negotiation been going?”

Godfrey Smith, Attorney for B.T.L. Employees Trust
“I can’t say how it is has gone, if it has gone at all from the point of nationalization which, as you are aware, effectively took place on the twenty-sixth of August. What I can say is that the trustees, my clients of the B.T.L. Employees Trust, had reached the stage where they had meetings with staff and management. The management had indicated for instance that they were minded to nominate Mister Denzil Jenkins to be their representative to sit among the trustees. And the staff had been going through the process of consulting with all the other members of staff to come up with the name. At the time the nationalization occurred, we had not reached that point. So we can’t say what had if transpired anything since.”

Jose Sanchez
“How do you see moving forward with this case? Do you see a positive outcome?”

Godfrey Smith
“We would not file if we didn’t think there were fairly substantial and a number of substantial grounds on which to base the constitutional challenge. As I said, we filed it already so it’s a matter of public information, public knowledge that we are challenging the fact that the government says it’s for a public purpose. We will argue it is not for a public purpose. We will argue that it is arbitrary and we will argue that it is discriminatory.”

This is the first legal challenge to the nationalization of the telephone company and more litigation is expected to follow.