He had until Friday at 5:30 pm to pay, or face the legal consequences...but today David Fonseca sent a cheque to City Hall to cover $30 in bounced cheques. As we understand it, the cheque is drawn on a Barclay's Bank account and is made out for $30,217.85, the cumulative total of 12 bounced checks drawn on a Belize Bank account and cashed at the council between October 13 of 2005 and February 28 of 2006.
We should note that cashing cheques is against the council's standard policy but Mayor Fonseca used the persuasion of his high office to get council clerks to cash the cheques. In every case, the bouncing cheques were brought to his attention but he never repaid them. Fonseca has said that the bounced cheques were part of a social assistance programme where he would use personal funds to provide handouts to the poor.
And while this $30,000 is out of the way, there's still $218,000 in personal loans which he has not accounted for, and $155,000 for a social assistance program for which he has provided no receipts. The council also intends to recover these amounts, particularly the $218,000 but they have not yet defined a legal strategy to do so.
