It's cutting expenses by 5% across the board, but it seems that government can still pass up major deals and just watch as someone else cashes in.
7NEWS has obtained documents which show Minister of Natural Resources Hon. John Briceno on June 7th., transferring parcel 788 in Santa Elena to the Corozal Free Zone Management, or CFZMA, for $10. Before the ink was quite dry on that document, the CFZMA turned around and sold this same piece of land for a tidy profit. How much? Try $1 million. A subsequent transfer document shows that parcel 788 was sold by the CFZMA to the Montecarlo Investments Group on June 10th., just three days later. That's a $999,990 profit in just three days, and all the money goes to the CFZMA, an autonomous statutory board, not the cash strapped Government of Belize.
But that obscene profit is only half the story. The other half is that the land in question appears to be the old Customs and Immigration building. Those buildings have been replaced by the Border Management Building, and like all other public assets, were up for privatization. Now they will be the staging ground for the Montecarlo casino. That's right, a casino is now being built on that million-dollar piece of land.
So why didn't the government sold to Montecarlo itself and generate the revenue for itself. Well there are deals and wheels within those deals and the best answer we've been able to find is that the CFZMA has its own money issues. Apart from sagging sales revenue, it is burdened by indebtedness for the road built to take visitors to Glenn Godfrey's defunct Galleria Maya Project.