So ZMT and BCH have to consider their options as government has significantly moved the goalposts on them, but for the Opposition, it can claim to have exposed a questionable contract and forced government to roll it back against the stated public position of the Prime Minister himself. But Leader Dean Barrow isn’t finished yet; he says the contracts should be not only revised, they should be put out to tender.
Hon. Dean Barrow, UDP Leader
“I think things went wrong from the start because there was no kind of open tendering process. We are very concerned about the manner in which all PSA's have been awarded and we are saying cancel and before you talk about substituting new terms, give other people a chance to bid and then have a kind of informed process that will determine which bid is in the best interest of the people of Belize.”
Jules Vasquez,
ZMT makes the argument, so does the government, that Belizean companies involved in petroleum exploration should be treated more favorably.
Hon. Dean Barrow
“That’s absolute nonsense because there are other Belizean companies that were given PSAs at the signing ceremony two weeks ago that were not treated in the fashion that ZMT and BCH were treated so that’s a red herring. The interest of one Belizean company must give way to the larger national interest and that’s exactly what did not happen in the case of BCH and ZMT.”
Jules Vasquez,
The UDP one thinks, from a conventional perspective, would have preferred if the scandal of the issuance of these unfavorable PSA's would have continued until it reached a crescendo pitch. So strategically the government has acted wisely to basically concede its error and fix it.
Hon. Dean Barrow,
“But that’s just it, conceding the error confirms the error and it is not just an isolated error. This is part of a pattern.”
Jules Vasquez,
What, from your knowledge of how public policy decisions are made, could have intervened on the Prime Minister to have had such a dramatic reversal?
Hon. Dean Barrow,
“Fear of popular discontent in fact overflowing into the streets. Popular discontent that, as I said, was being in fact encouraged, guided, by the media and popular discontent that the Opposition was certainly prepared to try to harness by way of a mass public protest, a mass street demonstration.”
And while government’s sudden change of direction has forced the UDP to cancel a press conference it had scheduled for tomorrow, Barrow says there’s more than just this play afoot.
