The City Council came clean in today’s Amandala, printing its payables, or all the money it owes. It’s quite a total, $8.5 million, including that $275,000 to Social Security and almost two point eight million dollars to sanitation companies BML and SEL. But what caught our eye was a huge debt owed to a company called Triple B Heavy Equipment. That company is owed $220,000. That’s quarter - million and we wondered if that’s the shadow company charging for street repairs that so many council insiders have been whispering to us about.
Well, according to the City’s Director of Financial Services Dwain Davis, it is not a shadow company. He says Triple B is legitimately owed for roadwork done on Belize City streets. When we asked Davis what streets over what period of time, he could not specify. The only street he could name that Triple B had worked on was Gentle Avenue- and he couldn’t say when. We do know that Gentle Avenue was graded in January.
But we also know that much of the roads around the city were being patched up for free by the Ministry of Works – so to still have a debt of a quarter of a million for street repairs is quite a tab! But, the bottom line is that most of the debt has not been paid. According to Davis, they did pay twenty thousand dollars to Triple B, but the $220,000 is still outstanding.
As for the council’s other outstanding debts, which as we said are staggering, to be fair, about two million dollars of the one point two of the two point eight million dollar debt to the Sanitation Companies was inherited form the previous council, as was a three point six million dollar loan form the Alliance Bank.
