Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and Buckingham Palace owns a chariot made out of gold, amongst a cornucopia of other riches which were derived from Britain’s centuries of imperial rule in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the Caribbean. Despite the fact that Belize supposedly became sovereign and independent in September of 1981, all the official representatives of the Belizean people, both elected and appointed, publicly swear allegiance to “Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors.”
The fight that is presently taking place between Prime Minister Dean Barrow and his Cabinet, on the one hand, and Eamon Courtenay, SC, and the Bar Association, on the other, concerns the Barrow government’s new contract for Justice Samuel Awich of the Belize Court of Appeals. So then, this is a fight about the judiciary, but it is also a fight about politics and finance.
Lord Michael Ashcroft, a British billionaire who had spent a couple years in British Honduras as a child in the late 1950s, returned to Belize in 1985, four years after Belize’s independence and the year after Belize changed government for the first time, electing the United Democratic Party (UDP) to replace the People’s United Party (PUP) in December of 1984.
A smooth, ruthless, world class operator, Ashcroft quickly acquired Belize’s historic Royal Bank of Canada for a pittance, and changed its name to the “Belize Bank.”
When the PUP returned to power in September of 1989, Dean Barrow and Rodwell Williams left the Dean Lindo law firm and opened their own law firm, Barrow & Williams, at the corner of Albert Street and Albert Street West. They took the briefs of some of Mr. Lindo’s clients along with them, and one of these briefs was likely Michael Ashcroft’s.
Ashcroft and Glenn Godfrey, the PUP Attorney General appointed in 1989, began to hold discussions. In 1992, the Belize Bank played a major role in declaring Derek Aikman a bankrupt and having him thrown out of the House of Representatives. This was a personal vendetta on Godfrey’s part, because he wanted to punish Aikman for having defeated PUP Leader/Prime Minister George Price in the Freetown constituency in the 1984 general election.
Having gotten into the PUP government’s good graces, Ashcroft convinced the PUP dons – Godfrey, Ralph Fonseca, and Said Musa, to have him acquire control of the then telecommunications monopoly – Belize Telecommunications Limited (BTL). This took place, in questionable circumstances highly favorable to Mr. Ashcroft, before the UDP returned to power in June of 1993. Ashcroft also acquired major holdings in the Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) during the PUP 1989-1993 term.
When the PUP returned to office in 1998, Ashcroft opened a construction company, Johnson and Johnson, which signed lucrative contracts with the Musa government for huge projects such as the Marine Parade, the Orange Walk Town bypass and several others.
Having a sense of how the British government used the private British East Indian Company to exploit India during Britain’s imperial and colonial rule there, we have always wondered where it is that the businessman Ashcroft ends and the so-called British Commonwealth begins. Michael Ashcroft was known to have close ties with Buckingham Palace in the 1990s, and he has been a high ranking official in Britain’s Conservative Party, which returned to power a few years ago.
From the time he opened his Barrow & Williams law firm in 1989, Mr. Dean Barrow has been a lead lawyer for Mr. Ashcroft and the Belize Bank. Once the UDP came to power in 2008 under his leadership, however, Mr. Ashcroft’s lead lawyer became Eamon Courtenay. The new PUP national campaign manager, Godfrey Smith, is also a prominent Ashcroft-retained attorney. It is interesting to note that Smith was a junior partner in the aforementioned Barrow & Williams law firm in the early and middle 1990s.
Since the Barrow UDP government came to power in 2008, Lord Ashcroft’s attorneys have attacked the Government of Belize in lawsuit after lawsuit, both in Belize and in London, in the Supreme Court, in the Court of Appeals, in the Privy Council, and now in the Caribbean Court of Justice. Ashcroft is a Belizean citizen, was once Belize’s ambassador to the United Nations, and has declared his love for Belize on various occasions. The evidence of these multiple lawsuits suggests, however, that Lord Ashcroft’s love for Belize is similar to alligator’s love for dog, as the old people say.
In the beginning, Bar Association complaints against Justice Awich focused on lack of performance. The present indictments from the Bar appear to accuse Justice Awich of partiality to the Government of Belize.
In colonial days, the power structure considered it vital for us natives to believe in the absolute purity of the justice system. In line with that, the publisher and editor of this newspaper were tried in the Supreme Court for “seditious conspiracy” in July of 1970. In the case of the Queen versus Ismail Omar Shabazz and Evan X Hyde, the representatives of the Queen charged that Amandala had made “a mockery of the administration of justice.”
Nevertheless, in 2014, 33 years after our independence, the masses of the Belizean people have become quite skeptical about Belize’s administration of justice. One of the reasons for our skepticism is that the big time attorneys change sides whenever it suits their party politics and fattens their checkbooks. Now, the attorneys seem to be accusing a judge of suspect integrity. At the end of the proverbial day, this is a fight among elephants who are all completely loyal to “Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors.”
Power to the people.