22.8 C
Belize City
Friday, March 29, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

Court order freezes Public Sector Workers Trust, mediation to commence next year

HeadlineCourt order freezes Public Sector Workers Trust, mediation to commence next year

BELIZE CITY, Mon. Dec. 18, 2017– Millions of dollars that have been accumulating in the Public Workers Trust Fund was placed on hold by a Supreme Court order last month, when two of the workers sued the trust. The court ordered a freeze in the activities of the trust, with mediation to take place between the parties within 45 days of the court order.

The monies that accumulated in the trust fund came about as a result of 450,000 shares in BTL that former Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel had granted to public sector workers, when government placed a wage and increment freeze on public officers and teachers from 1995 to 1997. The BTL shares have grown into a very tidy 7.8 million dollars.

It is that money which was being controlled by the Public Workers Trust that has become the bone of contention between the workers and the unions. And the court has ordered all activities to be stopped.

The beneficiaries of the trust fund are about 600 retired public officers and teachers that the government wage freeze had affected.

In November, some of the workers sought and obtained an injunction from Supreme Court Justice Courtenay Abel, who instructed the unions to stop spending and stop lending monies from the trust fund.

Magali Marin-Young represented the retired public officers. Attorney Anthony Sylvestre represented the trustees, and Samantha Matute-Tucker, represented the Government.

Last Monday, December 11, at a press conference, attorney Magali Marin-Young explained the court’s decision.

“Ultimately the court decided that the trust deed was void. It decided that the true beneficiaries were those public officers who were employed between 1995-1997. The court also asked the trustees, who were the unions, to do a full accounting of all funds that they have received between 1997-2014. So that is the gist of the decision of this court. So this matter has been tried and there is an actual decision on the case. The court, however, ordered that the unions, in consultation with the beneficiaries and the government, come up with a draft of a proper trust deed to reflect the true purpose of the trust and to reflect who the true beneficiaries of this trust are. The parties were also given the liberty to apply to enforce the court order,” Marin-Young told the press conference.

Marin-Young was asked about the 2013 trust deed that the court has declared null and void and if the current trustees sitting in those positions are sitting legally, since they were empowered by a trust deed that the court has struck down.

“That’s a very legal question. But yes, when any property is handed to any person, and in this case the background is that in 2007 government transferred the BTL shares to the unions, and then in 2014 it transferred all the income derived from these shares to the unions. But in law, whenever property is transferred to you in trust for somebody else, you are trustee. So presently, the unions are the de facto trustees of this fund, until a proper trust deed is drafted. The beneficiaries were seeking to restrain the trustees from lending monies, disbursing monies out of the trust funds, and we were successful in getting an order restraining the trustees from disbursing trust funds without permission of the court,” replied Marin-Young.

In reply to a question about the loan programs that the trust funds were being used for, Marin-Young said, “The purpose for which government established this trust and which it promised to these public officers, why it was establishing this trust was to provide for programs that would be beneficial to them. The trustees have established a lending scheme using trust funds presently and have been lending to public officers generally, unsecured loans. We understand that they are taking a security, some charge on the emoluments of public officers, but for the most part the little we have gathered is that they are unsecured loans and it’s not exclusively to the benefit of the true beneficiaries. It has been established for all public officers.”

The court has ordered that a new trust deed be drafted in consultation with the claimants and the government.

Sheila Genitty, one of the claimants in the court case, explained they never intended to take over management of the trust fund.

“That was never our goal. I want to go back to the reason why this trust was set up. In those 2 years, all the beneficiaries and public officers who were working at that time lost 2 years of increment. Now that multiplies, because by the time we retired those 2 years of increment caused our gratuity to be smaller, because it was worked out on a lower salary. It caused our pensions to be smaller. Our objective from the beginning was to be compensated for the loss that we had, and I will go back to the increment. The way an increment works is between the employer and the employee. It is an award-based system. You work well, you get your increment. The employer pays when your increment is awarded to you,” Genitty said.

Genitty added, “Now we cannot understand how it is that the loss that we suffered, instead of that money coming to us, or the dividends coming to us who suffered the loss, it was given to a third party, and the third party is the unions…now they sit in control of that funds. So, in effect what they are doing, they are denying me and denying Mr. Gardiner and Miss Ruth and every other beneficiary the increments that they should have received. The unions were never a part of the increment program. When you work you get your increment. The union has nothing to do with that. So, why should they sit now in a position of control to say ‘you will not get anything, you have to bring a proposal, you have to bring something else to be able to get something from this fund.’ Everybody else is benefitting and the people who lost have received nothing.”

“We are not interested in running a trust. We want to be compensated,” Genitty said. “That was always our goal. One of the misinformation out there is that there is no way of finding out who the beneficiaries are, and the number of beneficiaries. That’s what the union keeps saying. They’ve been saying that for the past 20 years. They’d been saying that since 2014, and we made a call out there in the media and we received names. People contributed to our fund, so we were able to get legal counsel and we have a list, so to me it seems that the unions deliberately mean to pretend that they can’t get a list of beneficiaries. We have the list of beneficiaries right here. The fact that we could get this; they could have done the same,” she said.

One retired public officer who has been affected by the increment and wage freeze was Clinton Gardiner, who retired as Commissioner of Lands and Surveys.

Gardiner told Amandala, “I don’t think that the Ministry of Finance should have come up with the trust idea. They should have figured out individually and deposited the money in our smart stream accounts for who never got their full entitlement upon retirement.” Gardiner retired at 50.

Editor’s Note: The writer of this story was unable to get comments from any of the managers of the Trust prior to press time. Until such time that he is able to do so, there is some background that we can provide to this story.
The managers of the Trust have argued that the money would serve public servants better if it was managed as a lump sum, to be used as a revolving fund. The foundation of the capitalist system happens to be, yes, capital. We have seen recently how one man with capital, Mr. Ashcroft, has had his way with our country.

There must be creative solutions applied to these funds, so that those who choose to be paid off get their just payment, and enough funds remain to provide for a capital base for our workers.

(Photo: Channel 5 News)

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International