They were never going to be paid anyway and yesterday, Cabinet gave the approval for the DFC to write off $5.8 million in small loans. The loans, 1,525 of them were for agricultural and hurricane recovery purposes, and DFC came to the decision that prudentially it's best to write them off because they'll never be collected anyway. Government will now absorb this debt.
And while those loan holders, mostly in Northern and Southern Belize can breathe easier tonight, taxpayers cannot, because it's just one more way of showing how badly mismanaged the DFC was. This is illustrated in the fact that the DFC, at its height, had a $550 million portfolio disbursed across 9,500 loans but if 15% of those loans only account for 3% of its portfolio, it's clear that most of the loans were large amounts awarded to a few individuals, proving the old theory that the DFC was a low interest bank for wealthy, well connected individuals.
Close to $100 million of DFC's portfolio is considered, if not unrecoverable, then at least in serious jeopardy.
