The accommodation agreements signed between Belize Telemedia Limited (BTL) and the former administration of Said Musa, beginning in 2004, continue to be the subject of intense legal battles inside the Belize Supreme Court.
That dispute deepened Tuesday when Supreme Court Justices John Muria and Samuel Awich summoned up three separate cases, which BTL is seeking to consolidate into one for its own convenience – a request which attorney for two of the complainants, Lois Young, says she will fervently resist.
The Supreme Court cases were filed by the Government of Belize (#317 of 2009) in one instance, the Public Utilities Commission (#275 of 2009) in the second instance, and the Association of Concerned Belizeans (ACB) and Senator Godwin Hulse (#279 of 2009) in the third.
They seek the court’s intervention to either quash the accommodation agreements as illegal, or to stop Belize Telemedia Limited from collecting on the $38.5 million judgment awarded to the company in London Court of International Arbitration proceedings.
On April 8, the Government successfully got the court to grant a temporary injunction to block the payment, in ex parte hearings before Justice Awich. However, on April 24, BTL applied to the court to have that order discharged, and the company also plans to defend its case, insisting that the LCIA award must be paid by the Government of Belize.
BTL is represented in all three cases by Eamon Courtenay, SC, whereas Lois Young, SC, assisted by her daughter Deanne Barrow, are taking the case load for the PUC and ACB/Senator Hulse. Michael Young has taken over from Lois Young to fight GOB’s case, asking the court to not enforce the LCIA award against the Government.
Lois Young and Eamon Courtenay appeared first before Justice Muria at 9:00 a.m., and Courtenay told the court that his client was seeking to have the cases consolidated as one. Papers had been drawn up, said Courtenay, but he was not sure whether they had yet been filed with the Registry.
Muria projected that the case before him would be “very hotly defended,” by BTL evidently, because the Government, the first defendant in the case, has indicated that it would not defend the matter.
On Tuesday morning, Crown Counsel Philip Palacio conceded before Muria to the claims made by the ACB and Senator Hulse, but Palacio told Justice Muria that he had no instructions from the Attorney General’s Ministry on what position to take on BTL’s request to have the cases consolidated.
Explaining the gist of the cases filed by the ACB/Senator Hulse and the PUC, attorney Lois Young told Amandala:
“The ACB is concerned about the constitutionality of any agreement that says to a taxpayer: Don’t pay your taxes, set it off against a debt that you say we owe. A tax, any tax that’s levied by the Government, needs to go into the Consolidated Revenue Fund first, and then be taken out by an Appropriation Act.
“In other words, you cannot know what is coming in as revenue unless it goes into the one Consolidation Fund, and then you take it out afterwards. You cannot bypass that step. That’s what the Association is concerned with, and Senator Hulse.
“The PUC is concerned about an onslaught to the powers given to it under the Telecommunications Act by the accommodation agreements – a total emasculating of the PUC, and completely unlawful.”
Courtenay told Justice Muria that because his client wants to have the cases consolidated, there should be an adjournment until a later date. Justice Muria agreed and granted an adjournment until 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, May 13.
Attorney Lois Young told the judge that she does not agree with having the cases consolidated, and that she expects some very weighty issues will arise when the application for consolidation is finally considered.
After the parties left the courtroom of Justice Muria, they presented themselves before Justice Samuel Awich, who, as the Acting Chief Justice in early April, had awarded the Government of Belize an interim injunction, blocking, at least for the meantime, any move by BTL to collect the $38.5 million arbitration award.
Today, Justice Awich ruled that that interim order should remain in force until Thursday, July 9, when he intends to hear BTL’s application, asking the court to discharge that order.
Justice Awich also ruled Tuesday morning that the application to have the case before him between the Government of Belize and BTL, consolidated with the other two would have to be heard after he deals with the injunction matter.
When she spoke with Amandala outside the courtroom, Young said of BTL’s application for consolidation: “I don’t think it’s a bona fide application; I think there are ulterior motives. I have an idea what they are, but things haven’t evolved to the point that I can say what they are. But certainly things are not as they are trying to make out – a benign application to save on costs and time.”
Young said that so far, she has not received any documentation of BTL’s request to have the three Supreme Court cases consolidated.
Speaking more on the PUC’s challenge to the accommodation agreements, Young said that the PUC’s reason for claiming illegality is: “…because the PUC is the regulatory body that gives licenses, and if you have an agreement whereby the Government of Belize agrees with Belize Telemedia that the PUC will give no more licenses to individual license holders, and will give no more class licenses, and that the PUC will set tariffs according to what BTL submits to the PUC and not according to how the PUC sees it fit for tariffs to be set and according to market conditions, those are things that the Telecommunications Act specifically tells the PUC you are to do.”
On the KREM WUB show this morning, Young announced that the ACB would be asking the public to sign a supporting petition for the case, just as it did when it collected nearly 1,700 signatures to support the 2007 filing which challenged agreements the Government, under the administration of Said Musa, made with BTL’s sister company, the Belize Bank, to cover an unlimited amount of private debt for Universal Health Services (UHS).
Last week, Justice Minnet Hafiz ruled in that case, making a narrow but meaningful declaration that the loan note Musa had signed with the bank to pay off the debt of $33.5 million for UHS (now Belize Healthcare Partners) was unlawful, because it violated the Finance and Audit (Reform) Act.
(Amandala made numerous attempts on both Tuesday and Wednesday to solicit comments on the request for consolidation from Eamon Courtenay (in person, via phone and via e-mail), but all those attempts have, at the time of this writing, proved futile.)