Mayor says deputy signed the cheques
It has become one of the biggest scandals to hit Mayor Zenaida Moya and within days of Sunday’s U.D.P. convention. It is the matter of an additional ninety thousand dollars she has collected since 2006 and which the Councillors say was unauthorized and she’s got to pay back. The usually outspoken mayor, was quiet today and instead deployed her attorney to deal with the scandalous situation. While attorneys for Moya say it is all above board, there is no reflection of approval in the Council’s minutes of March seventeenth, 2006. And according to Moya, no less than her deputy, turned contender, knew of the additional monthly payments of three thousand dollars that put her yearly salary at one hundred and eight thousand dollars. And to drive home her point, the Mayor today made available copies of cheques signed by her Deputy Anthony Michael.
Michael Peyrefitte, Lawyer for Zenaida Moya
“We took that to mean that they were accusing the mayor of nothing short of theft. They were accusing her of committing a crime. So she has asked me to advise her given the possibility that maybe they may want to involve the police, maybe they want to involve the Director of Public Prosecutions. We have taken the step. I have advised her, based on the allegations made, to remain quiet on the issue and we will not get into any back and forth. If there is enough evidence that they want to bring to the DPP to have them charge the mayor, we will have our day in court to clear her name. But to show, Marion, quite frankly, the maliciousness and the vindictiveness of the accusation, what the Deputy Mayor failed to remember was that when the mayor is not available to sign cheques, he is the one to sign the cheques and I have brought to you an example of the April 2008 salary payroll for certain members of the council that is attached to a cheque that was signed by the deputy mayor himself. Now from the first to the sixteenth of April, representing the payroll for that period, the deputy mayor, Anthony Michael, signed a cheque totalling a certain amount for salaries for certain members of the council. In that was an amount which he saw on a piece of paper accompanying the cheque, totalling fifteen hundred dollars as salary for the mayor. In another cheque representing the period from the seventeenth of April to the thirtieth of April thereabouts, the deputy mayor signed another cheque for a certain amount and that cheque represented another fifteen hundred dollars that was on the paper attached to the cheque as salary fort he mayor. So then the evidence as produce by the deputy mayor himself when he signed the cheques shows clearly that the mayor was approved a salary of three thousand dollars per month because it was the deputy mayor himself who signed the cheque.”
“The question that anybody should have for the deputy mayor is this. I the mayor were not authorised to received those two cheques for fifteen hundred dollars totalling three thousand dollars a month as her salary, if she were not authorised to receive that then why did you sign a cheque giving her that? “
Marion Ali
“Can she sue anybody for these allegations?”
Michael Peyrefitte
“Certainly, I mean the mayor has a convention on Sunday; she is occupied with that. But certainly, I have given her advice and she has asked me certain questions and certainly that is privileged but it certainly isn’t out of the question that clearly in my view she would have a case of libel and slander. She certainly would have that against the deputy mayor and against all those who are pushing the story that she somehow stole.”
The big score between Mayor Moya and her councillors will be settled on Sunday at the Belize City Center in one of the most hotly contested conventions in which thirty-four others are on the U.D.P. slate for election to the Belize City Council.
