The President of the National Trade Union Congress of Belize, Marvin Mora, has latched sides with the Vice President, Audrey Matura in what appears to be an all out campaign to either declare the Petro Caribe bill either illegal or immoral. And as they go about their campaign they have forgotten two crucial things about Petro Caribe, or maybe it is that they are so consumed by their anti-Petro Caribe rhetoric that it is obfuscating what they should know.
What Matura and Mora should know is that Petro Caribe is funding the Belize Infrastructure Limited (BIL) which is the government operated company which is implementing sporting facilities across the country. BIL is headed by a board of directors one of whom is a member of the NTUCB. If it is transparency and accountability that Matura and Mora are chiding the Petro Caribe bill for, all they need to do is to ask their representative on BIL to appraise them of how the money is being spent. BIL goes through some tedious processes to ensure accountability and we are sure that the union representative there is aware of these. Mora and Matura, please check your representative to see how the money is being spent.
What they also need to check is that the National Bank was originally capitalized with 20 million dollars from Petro Caribe and later 10 million dollars was infused to ensure, that most of all, public officers and teachers are able to access finances to make their lives better.
The following is a breakdown of the activity at the National Bank as of February of this year: 708 public officers have received loans from the bank, of these 196 were for house construction, 87 were refinancing, 30 were for vehicles and 395 were personal loans. These amount to a value of $12,624,085.39. 134 Teachers have also received loans from the bank, of these 34 were for housing, 17 were refinancing, 2 for vehicles, and 81 personal loans amounting to $4,293,148.65.
If it is accountability that Matura and Mora wanted, all they needed to do was to ask. All is available. But the truth is that they do not want an accounting of the Petro Caribe funds, they want to derail the entire process, is it at the bidding of the Lord? We may not know that, what we do know is that so far at least 842 individuals whom they purport to represent have directly benefitted from the Petro Caribe financed National Bank and there are 333 members of the general public who have also received loans, additionally 17 small businesses have also received benefits from the Bank. That is a grand total of 1,192 persons who have received Petro Caribe finances through the National Bank.
Matura and Mora, are you really trying to stop this kind of development?
