7 News Belize

The Question of Compensation
posted (October 15, 2010)
And while the government is offering the BTL employees a working trust to woo them away from the hard-charging, tough-selling Sunshine Trustees - there's no getting around the fact that government will have to compensate the former owners of BTL - including Sunshine. Those are four companies called ECOM Ltd., Thiermond Ltd, Sunshine Holdings Limited, and Mercury Communications Limited- which are all ultimately corporate cells in the highly truncated Ashcroft alliance. But how much will the compensation to those companies be? Principally, they owned about 94% of the company and at the value of five dollars per share - which is what Government's shares are being sold at - do the math, and today's share offering would seem to suggest a compensation package of around 234.2 million dollars.

That is far, far less than the 300 million US suggested by the Ashcroft allied attorneys. And today the prime minister hinted that the proposed compensation won't even be around 234 million.

PM Dean Barrow
"The price per share that the company was worth at the time government acquired it, certainly has to be less than the price per share now a year and change after during which period all sorts of wonderful things have happened as a consequence of the Belizeanization and we are confident that in fact there is going to be a difference between the price then and the price at which at which we are selling now, and it will not be a difference that will be negative for the government and people of Belize."

Home | Archives | Downloads/Podcasts | Advertise | Contact Us

7 News Belize