And going back to the Prime Minister's interview today, he also spoke about former Miss Universe Belize Isabella Zabaneh.
Social media reaction to her recent comments at a PUP National Party Council meeting has been harsh. That's after she suggested increasing the threshold for payments from government ministries to above $10,000. This after the recent scandal has been about thousands of sub-ten-thousand-dollar payments to avoid scrutiny of the Ministry of Finance.
The PM called the criticism unfortunate and added that they will be implementing her suggestion. He explained how the new system would work.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"It's unfortunate, we should encourage women to participate more in events like this and I want to commend her for her courage to be able to say something that everybody knows but because of the present circumstances, everyone is afraid of saying it. Actually under the central procurement unit, that is one of the things we are going to address. 20 years ago the budget was less than 1 billion dollars, right now it's 1.8 billion dollars. There's so much things, the government is buying 400, 500 million dollars of services every year, when you include roads and so it goes up even more. And so it becomes almost impossible at $10,000 or below $10,000 so what we'll be doing under the centralized procurement unit is we're going to increase that number. But unlike now, everything will have to go through one portal, or one window, every ministry has to put what they're doing in there so everybody will see, okay let's use the BDF, the BDF needs a million dollars worth of food supplies for 6 months for instance and these are the things we want. So let's say they increase the threshold for $20,000 or $30,000. If the ministry decides to give a company under that threshold, they'll be able to give it but they would also have to report it to the public and say this company got $20,000 and did not have to go to a contract. So what has happened where you see one company having hundreds and hundreds of payments under $10,000, it would be impossible for it to happen because in this case, all of that will be reported and people will immediately be able to see, hold on, something is not going correct here."
