And while Barrow says the settlement was arrived at out of political expediency and not nationalism, he's also not impressed with the purchase price for the Port of Belize. Government paid 166 million when the Ashcroft alliance said it was valued at twice that.
So that's a 50% discount - which sounds good, but Barrow says - form his experience it isn't worth that:
Dean Barrow, Former PM
"So for the government, now to be talking about victory laps and to be engaging in chest thumping and saying this is a good deal, let us look at the figures. How on earth can it be a good deal?"
"They sold the Port initially. So it's not as though they've now come full circle and said, oh no, as a consequence of nationalism…they haven't been bitten by the nationalist bug. They've been bitten by the Ashcroft relentless threat to bomb them into extinction."
"That is how they came to do this. And and again, it all happened because of their being, in my view, in bed with Portico."
"During the receivership period. The bank was trying to sell. The bank wanted to cover its financial losses. I know when I was there, you had at least two possibilities. Somebody came from Dubai and I can't remember where the other expression of interest was from. Certainly in terms of the Dubai inquiry; they came, they looked at the port. Jules, you know, what they offered for the port? 10 million USD. How can, you know, buy it for 166 million? Forget all that you had to pay in order to, to, in fact, get the port for 166. Let's just look at the raw number for the port itself. How can you pay 166 million dollars for a port that we all know is broken, is barely operational? Not too long ago, it had to be closed for urgent remedial work."
"A port that during the years of the receivership, the receiver had no interest in investing in because all it wanted to do was to sell and recover its money. When somehow it moved from receivership into the ownership of Waterloo that was when Ashcroft said Fine, I want to do a cruise port, but I will only you will give me the permit to do the cruise port and if you do that, then I'm giving you a package deal. I will no invest in the cargo port. I will expand it so it can become a container port. But it is all dependent on my getting the permit for the cruise port. These fellows, because of their own self-interest and in my view, motives that are less than Simon Pure, said no."
"And so the point is there was never any investment done in that port from the time it went into receivership until now. But you pay $166 million for it. You are going to have to spend, I believe, in the tens of millions more to bring it up to snuff. And you will beat your chest and hold a victory parade and say you did this and you got such a wonderful deal."
"And this was all for the Belizean people and an affirmation of nationalism. Again, pure B.S. You are obliged to do this. You overpaid grossly for it, but you had no choice because of the Ashcroft political threat and because you were determined to get rid of the Waterloo Cruise Project so you could privilege the Portico project for reasons that the Belizean people know only too well."
Of course, we also asked Barrow about the 600 million dollars he paid the Alliance for BTL - an asset which the PUP said was hardly worth one fifth of that. We'll have that part of the interview next week.
