And, as they move forward, there will be many days of senate hearings ahead - and they can, quote, "require the attendance of any minister of government."
One man who might be on that list is Prime Minister John Briceno - it's his ministry who took the Definitive Agreement into Cabinet in mid May.
And that's after an early May legal opinion from Trinidadian King's Counsel Douglas Mendes told government it was binding - but would need some amendments. His opinion was given after British King's Counsel Ben Juratowich had said the opposite on April 20th. Government didn't use that opinion - and relied instead on the Mendes opinion.
At an event yesterday, the press asked the PM why not rely on Juratowich - who is Belize's attorney at the International Court of Justice - and they got a surprising response. He said Juratowich misunderstood the instructions:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"What has happened is that unfortunately Ben 'Jurasovich', Senior, QC, misunderstood what was asked of him. So when our legal minds looked at it, basically they told me, Prime Minister, don't waste your time, don't read it, it's, it's ah, they misunderstood what was being asked of them, so we asked, Senior Counsel Mendes, Douglas Mendes who better understands the Caribbean and Belize and then he took a deeper look into it and then he made the opinion that he believes that the minister did had the legal authority to do it. But I think that we need to move on from this because we took it to Cabinet and we prepared everything, because that's what we do to Cabinet, but right there in Cabinet, in fifteen minutes we decided that we don't want to proceed this way and so I told Cabinet, I pulled it back, I said, I'm pulling back this paper and I instructed both Minister Mahler as the Minister of Tourism, and Minister Coye as the Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance to meet with all the parties and to come up with something different and something new and something that is going to be more palatable to everybody and that can meet the legal requirements in making such a big investment. They're working on that and I'm hoping that within the next few weeks we will be able to present something that can move this project forward."
We did try to reach Juratowich for comment via email, but up to news time he had not responded.
