On Monday, September 17th, the National Trade Union Congress of Belize (NTUCB) issued a press release in which it agreed with the government’s position that the Superbond should be renegotiated to better terms. The NTUCB’s position is now among the countless other organizations which have agreed with the government’s position that we simply cannot pay under the onerous terms that the bond is structured under.
The release however, goes on to state what most Belizeans have been thinking from the time when the bond and its purposes were made public – that is that those who actually made the loans that the bond covers should be held accountable.
That position has been one that the United Democratic Party has long held; if you do wrong you must be held accountable for it. The problem with the philosophy however, is that while there is a will and an urgency to get to those who made off with the millions of dollars, there is simply no real legal recourse by which this can be done.
Take for example the situation of the $20 million dollar Venezuelan grant.The government was able through civil proceedings, able to get the money returned back to the people and re-invested where it should have been invested. When it came to the criminal proceedings – in particular against Ralph Fonseca and Said Musa – it was a dismal failure. It is always simpler to prove things in a civil court than it is to do so in a criminal one and both men walked away after the cases fell apart even before it began. We cannot say that we can blame the judiciary for the failure, what we can say is that those who are really accountable for wrong doings, especially in the government service, tend to be more slippery than an eel and make off scot free. Such is the nature of the beast.
Even Johnny Briceno was known to have vented against his corrupt crowd when he demanded that the money be brought back to his party, but as is always the case, it was to no avail. The moneys still linger in the foreign bank accounts of former and present PUP politicians and, sad to say, there is very little that can be done to get it back.
Our one hope from what the NTUCB is requesting is that the government through its negotiators is asking for a better deal, a better deal to better serve the Belizean people even though we may never know who exactly has all those millions which we have been saddled to pay for.
