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Mayor Zenaida Moya is being pilloried in the press – accused directly by her own party of taking nineteen thousand dollars in an unauthorized vacation grant. But if it ain’t on BBC, it’s no bother to her, because yesterday Mayor Moya left for the UK.

While speculation is rife about which strategic ally the Mayor went to meet, the fact is that she went to attend a meeting of the Commonwealth local government forum. Mayor Moya was elected chair of that body in June. It has raised the eyebrows of her opponents that the travel allowance for the four day conference is one thousand Belize dollars – not quite a King’s Ransom, but critics say it is too much to ask from a council that is just plain broke. But that’s quibbling over dimes, when an audit report shows that the mayor was overpaid by tens of thousands of dollars during her term of office.

Late this evening, the Mayor’s office sent an angry and passionate release countering those disclosures. The release is written in the first person and expresses outrage that an audit report has been leaked to the media when it has not reached the Mayor’s office.

As we said it’s worded in the first person and it says, “I maintain that I never agreed to a less salary than the former mayor. Why would I have agreed to that?” It concludes that, “All these allegations are a continued plot to…destroy my character and end my political career.” It closes by saying that in time the Mayor will vindicate her good name and character.

That vindication had better come quickly because this weekend the UDP National Party Council is meeting to appoint an ethics committee to decide on disciplinary measures against her. The court has given Moya’s attorneys an October 30th hearing for a request for an injunction to halt expulsion proceedings against her.