The second 10 million US dollars in Venezuelan grant funds may be the subject of dispute with the Belize Bank, but as far as the government of Belize is concerned, starting next week, those funds are going to their rightful owners – Belize’s poor.
The Ministry of Housing will hold a press conference on Monday to announce that the funds will be disbursed starting next week. It will be discussed in detail at the event but the basic outline is that it will be shared out on a constituency basis – and each division will get something just above five hundred thousand dollars. That doesn’t quite add up to twenty million dollars but about one point five million dollars has been used for disaster recovery after the floods of 2008.
The money will be disbursed in loans but the controls – we are told - will be tight, nothing like the pre-election free for all that controlled the disbursement of the first 10 million US dollars.
