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The settlement still has to be signed by all the FTC Commissioners, but this is described as a routine process which should take a few weeks.  After that, the terms of the settlement will be made public.

And while that is a major development, it wasn’t the reason for today’s press conference.  

What triggered the Wednesday afternoon event at the Princes was a 50 page court filing by the FTC which leaked to the media yesterday.  It was filed on June 10th, when the FTC was playing hardball.  And the document makes all kinds of  claims about the conduct and actions of the Prime Minister and his law firm Barrow and Williams.  

The FTC was playing hard because the US lawyers for the Central Bank of Belize were trying to get the AIBL liquidation process moved to Belize’s Courts, which the FTC firmly opposed. 

PM Barrow says they used litigation as a means of warfare:..

Rt. Hon Dean Barrow - Prime Minister
"At the end of the liquidation process then, creditors would have collected in the order in which their claims ranked and it would have meant that FTC would probably have been at the end of the queue. This of course was a complete no no for the FTC and so they vigorously and vehemently opposed the application of the liquidator for this removal of the proceedings to the Belize jurisdiction and it was in that context that they went in my view completely overboard and filed a document on June 10th in answer to the liquidators application for the removal of the proceedings to the Belize jurisdiction. They obviously felt that litigation is a kind of war by other means and they clearly determined that they would cast all sort of doubts on the integrity of the Belize jurisdiction in an effort to show that they and the complainants that they represented would not be able to get justice in Belize and it was in that context that they file this document which relied on utterly unjustified innuendos, imputations and in some cases outright and complete misstatements of facts. During the course of the discussions that have now led to the settlement, I insisted that be put on record a part from what have been filled in answer to this by the liquidator's attorney that the Central Bank's attorney put on record how absolutely a gassed the government of Belize and the Central Bank had been at what was filed. You are not going to get any kind of apology out of the FTC clearly, so the best they have done is this sentence about the government including the Prime Minister Dean Barrow provided substantial assistance in helping to achieve this agreement."