And while he wants "sensible minds to prevail"- Mahler has a clear view of the acquisition. He worked in multiple senior executive positions at SMART for many years before taking office and - perhaps not surprisingly - says the company he helped build is well worth 80 million dollars:
Anthony Mahler, Minister of Tourism
"I said this many years ago - just being a part of telecoms for a long time - that there has to be consolidation for growth of any company, the technologies coming out the modernization of infrastructure, that is needed. These things are consistent, they are capital intensive and so the nature of the business, just being focused primarily on data because all the traditional revenue streams have gone away for the most part. So traditional voice, traditional SMS, traditional everything else other than data. That is where it is right now in terms of revenue streams and now how it is done that is a different thing and I think there should have been much more consultation before, they should have been open with the information being put out. But there are experts to do those things and put those types of deals but mergers and acquisitions happen, it is just not a part of our culture here in Belize but that happens everywhere in the world. Now I can tell you when I was at Speednet the value of it was somewhere around 70 to 75 million and so over time and I have been out of it for about 6 years now almost. And so the value probably would have gone up a little bit but just count the number of base stations or sites that they have across the country and multiply it by somewhere, anywhere if you low ball it, to 300k per site which it is more than that when I was a part of that process sites could have gotten up to a million dollars depending on the land you have to purchase and the infrastructure that you are going to put on it. So sometimes everybody wants to be negative this project had some level of negativity towards it but when you look at it, it enhances the areas right so if we were just to say here what everyone is going to be negative and we are not going to do something because they are negative towards it for whatever reason then nothing would happen anywhere in this world or this country."
