…but U.D.P. still plan to block loan in House
And while the Lizarraga letter has added a new dimension to the discourse about the U.H.S. debt, tonight the United Democratic Party is undeterred in its self-imposed mandate to block the settlement of the liability in the National Assembly. Earlier this week, Leader of the Opposition Dean Barrow sent a letter to the Prime Minister demanding disclosure of the guarantee, loan note, and associated documents. While he has yet to receive any of the information, this morning Barrow told News Five he is even more convinced that the Prime Minister committed an illegal act.
Dean Barrow, Leader of the Opposition
“I’m following up the letter asking for disclosure with a question to him, set down for the House meeting asking when it is—whether he proposes to make the settlement deed and the loan note available at least to members of the National Assembly and if so, when. So that is still very much live, especially since he is saying that those documents were not intended to be final, which strikes me as deceitful and as nonsensical.”
“I would feel and I would certainly hope that there are going to be members of Cabinet who will say next Friday that they cannot support the Prime Minister’s position. If that happens, it makes that position even more untenable. But even if that doesn’t, it seems to me that getting the National Assembly to support whatever new proposal the Prime Minister would put forward at the House meeting on Friday is one thing, getting the people of this country to support that proposal is quite another. That clearly is not going to happen and what it will do in fact is to seal the fate of the Prime Minister in the public opinion because there will be no turning back after that. He will have legally put this debt, which people are saying—which the electorate are saying ought not to be paid, he would have put that debt on an unassailable legal footing because once the National Assembly votes to pay, there is not a great deal that anybody can do, so he would really have been foreclosing the chance of a success of government doing anything about this debt and I think that really will tip the scales even more dramatically against him in terms of public opinion.”
As we have reported, the meeting of the House of Representatives is set to convene in Belmopan on Friday, May eighteenth.
