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The Belize Times
Established 1957
The Truth Shall Make You Free
10 DECEMBER 2017 | ISSUE NO: 5075
www.belizetimes.bz | $1.00
CABINET REVOLTS Barrow Afraid of the $90M Vote Thursday, 07 December 2017 It is said that uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and while Dean Barrow’s crown may be tarnished and twisted, the cliché has never been truer. The Prime Minister is caught in a twisted dilemma of his own making. As a somewhat competent attorney, he knows that the Caribbean Court of Justice was not offering him a way out through a vote in the Parliament, as he claimed at his recent press conference. The CCJ was not, as he claimed, telling him that as long as Parliament does not vote to approve the money bill all is fine and well in the land. Mr. Barrow has to pay. He is in a fix. A fix that could indeed land him, as the Minister of Finance, in prison if the Belize Bank goes that route. The Prime Minister has made some ridiculously stupid legal decisions – some say so stupid and rankly amateur that it had
to be deliberate. Those decisions resulted in Belizean taxpayers paying $557 MILLION for BTL, a company worth only $100 MILLION by the government’s own valuation. Because Barrow botched the settlement negotiation – again some say deliberately – Belizeans got nothing back as the Prime Minister had promised while beating his own chest and patting himself on the back. But Mr. Barrow knows that to disobey an order of the highest Court in the land, whether you like them or not, would be a folly he cannot afford. There is reliable information that when Mr. Barrow returned to Belize recently after getting legal advice, he went into Cabinet asking for their support to pay the $90M he owes the Belize Bank because of a stupid and petty decision he made. But try as he might, Mr. Barrow was unable to do so. And because he has
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