The Prime Minister outlined the entire case in a 40 minute address to parliament - and here are excerpts of that:..

PM Dean Barrow
"Mr. Speaker the main provisions of the bill allow the minister responsible for electricity to make an order with the approval of the Minister of Finance acquiring all such property as may be required to assume control over the supply of electricity in Belize and that is because a situation has been reached with the Belize Electricity Limited the sole supplier of electricity to the public in this country which makes clear that BEL is currently unable to pay for the power that it must purchase in order to transmit electricity to the nation. The current inability of BEL to pay for the electricity which it is to transmit to the public has been a developing story for some time now. But things started coming to a head when an SOS was call in to me at the end of April by Mr. Lynn Young the CEO of BEL and of May 4th as a follow up to that meeting Mr. Young wrote to me. It is worth Mr. Speaker quoting excerpts from that letter. This is important - the last excerpt from the letter Mr. Speaker. "Since the government is party to the agreements with CFE and BECOL as well as the loan agreements with CDB, IBRD and the EIB and thus exposed - we are seeking the government assistance in helping the company to manage its way through this very difficult period". That last part is extremely important - there are those who say 'you take over BEL, you have to pay the liabilities. Why are you assuming those liabilities?' what is made clear here is that we were going to assume them in any case because government is guarantor. The rest of the story to this point is well know Mr. Speaker. Mr. Young and I spoke on the phone before his trip that he took along with Senator Eamon Courtenay and FORTIS' Stan Marshall to go see the IMF and the World Bank in Washington on June 6th. Then we met on Friday of that week. None of what was suggested was acceptable to the government of Belize. How could they be? First of all; government was entirely unsure how BEL had got itself into its predicament in its first place and that's the question that everybody is asking? How does BEL get to where it says it is? So being unsure of what had really happen government could not simply continue to hand over tax payers' monies to a company over which it had no control.

I asked him to find out if Fortis would be willing to sell to GOB. And since the reply was couched in a take it or leave it manner, we wrote to Fortis's lawyer Eamon Courtenay saying we would leave it. Some may argue we should have made a counter-offer. But the peremptory nature of the Fortis response convinced us of the futility of that. After all, I had asked Mr Young to procure from Fortis a time and place for negotiations in the event Fortis was willing to sell. The fact that the Fortis answer deliberately omitted to do that, was a message that was hard to miss.

When we gave that 4 million dollars last Wednesday we thought it would buy us a couple of weeks. But it turned out that in addition to the just under 10 million owed to CFE for power, and the 12 million to BECOL, BEL also owed 5.1 million to BELCOGEN as of the BELCOGEN's May invoice. Still, BEL was giving none of the four million dollars that we gave them last Wednesday to BELCOGEN, I have the break down of how they were portioning that 4 million. The bulk of it were going to CFE, some was going to FORTIS and some was going the EIB. None was going to BELCOGEN. And that became a real tipping point. BELCOGEN needs money to service its own foreign debts, which are cross-referenced to the BSI sugar factory loans.

Without BEL as a buyer in good standing, BELCOGEN would ultimately also collapse. And because of the cross-default clauses, if the BELCOGEN loans are called the BSI loans are also called. It was therefore critical, in my view, that BELCOGEN should be able to assure its creditors that it will be able to collect for its electricity sales to BEL and the only way that can happen is if government is in charge and makes those payments. Otherwise, exit now the entire sugar industry and forget everything Government had already done last year by way of rescue.

The six thousand cane farmers and their families would never forgive us, the nation would never forgive us. It was in all these circumstances and the way things were ramifying that we decided there was no further time to spare. And so government is acting today by way of this Bill. There is simply no alternative and for all the reasons I have recited we must now urgently take over BEL in the public interest.

I will wrap up now by talking about how we will handle the transition. No one at BEL need fear for their job. I have spoken to officials of the BEL workers union, which fully supports Government in its move, and communicated this to them. It is the same thing with management. Mr Young has already indicated that he will not stay, and there are suggestions that other members of Executive Management might also wish to go. We have our plans in place for that eventuality. But nobody will be forced out and managers are free to stay if they wish.

The point I am making is that the government has every faith that we can make this work. All the skeptics - the Chicken Littles that decry a GOB takeover on the ground that it will lessen efficiency need to screw their courage to the sticking place."

The full address is available online - you can find a link to that at 7newsbelize.com or you can see it in its entirety after the newscast.

The House Sitting concluded at 12:30 - and the senate met at 3:00 pm to consider it. With the government majority - they also passed it. Of note is that Senator for the business sector Godwin Hulse voted against it saying that, quote, "This sends a very dangerous and frightening signal." He added that the problem is how it is being done - by acquisition rather than negotiated arrangement....and the private sector does not feel that all the options have been explored...