And while the Prime Minister is away, 7NEWS has received reliable reports from Belmopan that his finance team was able to meet a $38 million bullet payment to the Capital Markets Financial Services Group.
We are told that payment was due today, and that government scraped together just about all it could to meet the payment. This is the amount that government borrowed on Jeffrey Prosser's behalf in November of last year so that Prosser wouldn't default on his payment to the International Bank of Miami. The finance team must now gear up for another one of those bullet payments coming up in the first half of December and we're told that one will be for about US$12 million.
To better manage all these bullets, government has hired the International investment Bank of Houlihan, Howard, Lokey and Zoukin to come up with a debt management programme. That would mean a team of foreign finance experts sitting down and figuring out how to best manage Belize's loaded debt payment schedule and its limited cash resources, what finance folks call leveling the re-payment curve.
Government sent out a release announcing this presumably to steady the nerves of creditors and investors who have a stake in Belize's debt. Those investors fear that the programme is to launch what's known as a haircut programme where the value of the debt would be reduced and those creditor s could lose millions of dollars. From the Belize side, it's hoped that they can come up with a plan for re-financing that will be less costly than past refinancing ventures, which last year came up to 2% of GDP.
