Tonight and throughout tomorrow, shoppers in the commercial center of Belize City will bustle about. But while you get lost in the Christmas bustle, high finance maneuvers continue to be made with your Social Security money.
This week, BTL bought the Data Pro Compound, all 14.47 acres of it, at mile 14 on the Northern Highway. How does that affect your Social Security money? Well from our reading of the documents, in March of 2000, it seems Social Security used $17.9 million of your money and loaned it to Glenn Godfrey's St. James
Building Society, and in turn he loaned the money to his own company Data Pro Limited. 15 days later, in mid-March St. James handed the mortgage over to Social Security, meaning that every month, for 11 years, Data Pro had to pay Social Security $270,000 a month. Well, surprise, surprise, since January of 2005, Godfrey's Data Pro hasn't made any payments to Social Security and now Social Security is moving to try and recover some of its money by taking over Data Pro and selling it off.
Three days ago, on December 20, Solicitor General Elson Kaseke wrote the Registrar of Lands on behalf of the Prime Minister. 7NEWS has obtained that letter where he directs the registrar to transfer the title for Data Pro to BTL. The Sol. Gen. attaches a legal opinion to detail the legality of the transfer. And though it's been in default since January, Kaseke's opinion makes it apparent that Data Pro's ownership is not cooperating, so he orders the Registrar to effect the transfer without a court order.
And while those are administrative details of the deal, the questions are: how much did Social Security sell Data Pro to BTL for? And how much of Social Security's money remains un-recovered from that initial $17.8 million loan? We'll be pursuing answers to those questions next week.
