But the toxic fallout is not confined to Oscar Mira - there's a cloud of suspicion around the entire PUP about their possible involvement in what is nicely called political enterprise - and what regular folks would call wholesale hustling.
In a rare admission of error, the PM said, quote, "we will have to fix this" - even if he didn't quite explain how:
Jules Vasquez
"Are you in tuned with the public perception of your government and how this might have affected it?"
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"Well of course. I have been in politics since 1993 so I think you should know better. So it is something that we have to address and I believe that we will address. And at the end of the day, the people will see also the tremendous amount of work that we continue to do."
"At the end of the day people will say you know, we're not perfect; no one is perfect. You are not perfect, you make a lot of mistakes like myself. I think that at the end of the day people will SEE through that and that we will have to correct this, we will correct it and we will make sure that we try to remain as strict as possible to continue serving the people of Belize."
