Municipal Bond to be launched on Thursday

Darrell Bradley

The birth of a twenty million dollar municipal bond for Belize City was announced earlier this year in June. While the funds generated would have been used for several infrastructural projects around the City, floating the bond became a time consuming challenge for the City Council. The council faced mounting garbage collection debts while simultaneously trying to repair some of the worst streets in the City. The mayor now says that the bond will be introduced to investors on Thursday.

Darrell Bradley, Mayor, Belize City

“We are working closely with our external auditors; we’ve been talking with them—I had two conversations with them this morning and the only remaining thing is for them to sign off on our projections. Of course, we have the final draft of our prospectus. We’ve submitted the prospectus to them. It’s been with them since last week. They are going over the books; they’ve been working hard for us over this weekend and they came back with questions. We responded to the questions. Our internal team is working very, very closely with them and we anticipate that we will be able to launch our prospectus on Thursday of this week. And what we are going to do with the launch is that we are going to have a press conference and we will simply release it and the bond will be open for persons to review in terms of the information contained in the prospectus and persons will have thirty days to make an offer for purchase to the City Council. The bonds will be on sale at the Central Bank of Belize. We’re planning on doing it on the last leg of Freetown Road that is going to be completed. So we actually want to have a visual impact on what people will be getting if they invest in the bond and the contractor on Freetown Road, they are at Cinderella Plaza right now. That section is still not opened. It is going to be opened on Thursday and we want to open it along with the launch of the prospectus.”