Last year in the run up to the city’s mayoral convention – City Councillor Mark King went out like a kamikaze – accusing the mayor of making unauthorized payments to her brother’s trucking company. Mayor Moya took it in stride and went on to clobber the competition in the UDP convention. Well now that same issue has been resurrected by the PUP in graphic details. The Belize Times today published 24 checks totalling just under one hundred and ten thousand dollars which were signed by the Mayor and made out to her sister in law, Sharon Wade. Wade is the wife of Silvino Moya who owns a trucking company that picks up garbage for the city.
The twenty-four checks that appear in the paper are made out to wade between January fourth and February fifteenth, 2008. That’s twenty four checks issued in just thirty one working days! The smallest one is for seven-hundred and sixty dollars, and the largest one is for nine thousand and eighty dollars. But that’s only a part of the payments made to the company. The PUP claim and UDP sources corroborate that the entire amount paid out to the Mayor’s brother’s company or various persons associated with that company between December 2007 and May 2008 is two hundred and fifty three thousand dollars.
It has the air of scandal, but today when we spoke to Mayor Moya by telephone she was nonplussed. She said she accounted for that spending when Mark King first raised it. And while seeing the checks and the rapid pace at which they were being issued shines a new light on the metrics of the arrangement between the Mayor and her brother’s company, seemed to us that the mayor could care less. She told us that her brother was legitimately paid for services rendered and those services were to pick up garbage form hotspots. The Mayor said she made the decision because the council had to pick up the garbage immediately and he got it done. As for public perception and the optics of the entire arrangement, she told us, quote, “people don’t give a damn about how you get it done, just that it gets done....and she did what it took to ensure that the council looks good...”
Moya adds that she doesn’t think that the disclosure of the checks will affect her showing in the upcoming election in any way because the issues emerged before the convention and she still won.
