As the investigation into hundreds of thousands of dollars in missing money at the Belize City Immigration Department continues, we pressed the Prime Minister as he was the Minister at the time the issue started.
Here's what he said - in his own defence:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"The update is the same, it's under investigation, the person that is involved was quite creative in cancelling receipts but more than that I don't think I should comment because the police is investigating and I know the media trying make a story saying that well nobody is charged yet, police, it takes a long time to investigate and make sure that you have a good case because if you don't when you go to court they're gonna get these good defense lawyers and they find on misstep and say oh you have to throw out the case so we need to be careful we have to ensure that when we go to court we have a, a next to fool proof case."
Reporter
"This started when you were still Minister there do you believe that you should take some form of accountability?"
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"Well I think that the elections was in 2005 in March and I don't know when in 2025 it started in January, February, March we don't know yet so I guess it's premature to say something like that but at the end of the day as the Prime Minister I have to take responsibility for everything that happens within the government so yes if you want me to say that yes I'll take responsibility at the end of the day it's my responsibility as the Prime Minister but what's more important what we need to do is to be able to learn from these errors you know we put so much in place and so many check and balances but if we're not checking the check and balances then this happens cause there's a supervisor and the supervisor should be checking everyday and if a supervisor was checking and said hold on why is this individual have so many cancellations of receipts that alone should be a red light but I believe though as we're going into more digitizing the system I think we're able to pick up these things faster. That's why in some instances you have some members within the service that are not too enthused about digitization because digitization it leaves its stamp, you can always check back. It creates more efficiencies but also more accountability so it's more difficult to be able to do things like that."
