And like the minister said, those NHI services will be funded partly by the revenues received from Boledo and other government lottery services. We told you yesterday that the government announced Belize's favorite game will be returning on December 1st. While he wasn't a part of the team that handled the tendering and selection process, the minister has been privy to Cabinet discussions, and told us that the money will be going towards three sectors in Belize.
However, six months of revenue that could have been used has been lost - based on last year's figures from Brads - that's about 25 million dollars in revenue. We spoke to Bernard about it.
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health
"I also am very pleased that we could see the return of Boledo, I mean our Belizean society who deals with Boledo, now that is the culture, but for those who engage themselves in buying Boledo and so at the end of the day I'm not worried about the fact that it's the people who will spend the money but it's who it's going to benefit, how it's going to trickled down in healthcare, in sports, in education, these are the things that will come and I'm pretty sure that the team that was involved in this process did a lot of due diligence and making sure that they have done it right. We saw what happened under the previous arrangement, one person was getting all the monies and we could name all kind of things and we wanted to fix that, we wanted to return the Boledo to the government of Belize, to the people of this country whereby it will benefit them in return in terms of services that will be rendered further to them through health, education and sports."
Courtney Menzies:
"At the end of the day it was six months of revenue lost, which amounts to about 25 million, if we look at the revenues for last year, which was totaled at 50 million. Do you lament this 25 million lost?"
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health
"Lost to who?"
Courtney Menzies:
"To the government and the Belizean people."
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health
"At the end of the day, who was benefiting from it? If we would have continued that arrangement under the Brad's operation, we wouldn't have gotten anything from the Boledo, so I agree that the delay may have been a little bit, but at the end of the day, the benefits will come after this and that is the most important thing for me."
The two companies running the Toledo will be Nando's Wholesale Ltd. and MGM Entertainment Ltd. Nando's is a well known merchant with diversified holdings across different sectors, but there is no public information on the very sketchily named MGM Entertainment Ltd. We did try to ask the Prime Minister about it today - but he denied our request for an interview when we saw him in Orange Walk. And we reached out to the chair of the Lotteries Commission Narda Garcia for more information, but she left our messages on "seen."
