Yesterday, BTL's sitting Chairman Keith Arnold told the attorney for its chairman-in-exile Jeffrey Prosser that if any of the crowd from ICC dare step foot in BTL, they'll leave in jailhouse bangles!
The strong talk came after Prosser announced that as non-executive Chairman he'd be having a meeting at the Esquivel Telecom Center on Friday of this week.
And Arnold's written threat wasn't enough, there was more today as armed, private security guards were posted at major BTL compounds in the city today. Their presence is in addition to BTL's existing security personnel, 17 of whom are union affiliated.
And it seems Prosser has gotten the sense. A release from ICC today says that the board meeting will be held on Thursday February 22nd, not at BTL, but at the Princess Hotel.
Prosser says he's only pursuing the rights granted to him by judgments from Belize's supreme court and the Court of Appeals. In his release he says, "we will not give the illegal management of BTL a pretext to detract from the industrial action of the BTL workers by creating an incident with (ICC's) directors."
The so called "illegal management" is of course the one controlled by Michael Ashcroft after Utilities Minister Ralph Fonseca instituted, by statutory instrument, a new set of Articles of Association, which is the law that governs the company. In September, the Chief Justice famously ruled that Fonseca had violated the constitution by doing so - thus rendering invalid if not unlawful - all actions undertaken by the board which had been legitimized by the Fonseca articles.
And while all this happens at the board level - down below the union continues to gather support for its industrial action. It is planning a general membership meeting and will join Saturday's protest led by the BMDU.
