Last night, we brought you coverage of the honest and open conversation that the new BTL Board of Directors had with the shareholders at the company's 14th Annual General Meeting. That event was carried out virtually, and the new Chairman and the company's CEO gave detailed presentations on why the profitability of this national utility company had fallen so significantly.
Explanations were offered on the company's performance over the last 10 years, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the company's gross revenues, as well as plans that this new board of directors and management have for turning the company around.
The question of how long it would take for taxpayers, to get a return on the investment that the Barrow Government made to regain ownership of BTL for just about half a billion dollars did come up.
The new chairman told the press this weekend, that if he and the new management team can turn the company's fortunes around, the full return on that investment will be approximately 25 years. Here are those comments:
Markhelm Lizarraga - Chairman, BTL
"We look at the performance at the company over the last 12 years and the company was averaging a return on equity about 8.6%. Over the last 2-3 years we had some anomalies in the performance of BTL. They embarked on this aggressive path to borrowing and investing in capital and quite frankly there was not the attention that was deserve being paid to net profits, none at all and that is a travesty. We are focusing on that now, because we can't continue to borrow and operate on overdrafts and that kind of thing. We have to make the company sustainable, we have to put sustainable path and more so the country expects and deserve returns on this investment. So the projections that we made was that if we continue at 8% it would take us some 77 years for the government of Belize and the people of Belize to recover its investment. I must say that we were very conservative when we were making these projections too, because we put the cost at 3.5%. If we continued on the path we were on at a 3% return on equity it would have been over 100 plus years. So we had to bring it up and we started at 8%. At 8% it's going to take us some 70 plus years. We can't take that long to get back a return on our investment. And if we gradually move it up to 12% over the next 5 years, incrementally it going to take us some 25 years for the people of Belize to recover from this investment and we think that is absolutely reasonable."
