Jeffrey Prosser and his company ICC should be back in control of BTL by next week Tuesday. That's the order made today by Florida Federal Judge Ursula Ungaro-Benages and the judge made it doubly firm when she issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Government from doing anything further with BTL until a full hearing on the merits of the case is heard at the end of May.
She found that government acted illegally on February 9th when it removed 4 ICC Directors and took control of the company. In her judgement issued this afternoon in Miami, Benages ordered that Government must now re-appoint those 4 Prosser Directors. That would give Prosser 6 directors because he already had another two because he owns the special share. Government sold him that special share, with its power to appoint two directors, for just $1 even though the company's articles state that it cannot be sold and can only be transferred to a Minister of Government.
But that was just one more misstep along a terribly troubled path culminating in today's judgment which, by any reckoning, is an unmitigated disaster for government. Unmitigated because, by order of the Florida court, it reverses government's bold take-over, Prosser now regains control, and Government is left holding the Carlisle Shares and the US$57 million in debt it represents. And the Florida judge also had a scolding for government warning that it should stick to the commitments it makes to investors.
What will government do now? Well yesterday, the Prime Minister told us that he intends to appeal, no matter what. But that legal hardline may be more of an executive fantasy than anything else. The Florida Judge found that the GOB voluntarily submitted to U.S. Federal Court jurisdiction and surrendered sovereign immunity when it signed the contracts with Belize Telecom and ICC explicitly stating the same in those contracts. Indeed, 7NEWS has obtained the share pledge agreement which government inherited from the International Bank of Miami when it was assigned control of the Carlisle Shares and it says, "each of the parties irrevocably submits to the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for (South) Florida..."
With the issue of jurisdiction exposed as a red herring, today the Attorney General of Belize Francis Fonseca issued a comment saying that the situation can be remedied. He stressed that the Florida Judge only found that the procedure of removing the directors was improper. So government's position now is that, along with the minority shareholders, it can call for a special general meeting to change the directors. That's all fine and well, but it's also a fantasy because with the present breakdown of the shares only one director can be rotated out at every general meeting which would leave Prosser with 5 directors to government's and the minority's three. At that rate, it would take another two years to fully remove Prosser and that would assume that government would team up with Michael Ashcroft and the union shareholders to force a vote against Prosser.
A tangled mess, indeed, and one that just keeps getting worse for the phone company which by order of the court should come back under the control of Prosser's directors next week Tuesday at 5:00 PM when the judgment comes into effect.
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