But it is the new PUP City Council that has to pay, and within 5 days!

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. May 17, 2018– The Belize City Council that was led by the United Democratic Party (UDP) mayor Darrell Bradley left an outstanding balance of $77,026.80 in unpaid employees’ contributions to the Social Security Board that must be paid by the new City Council administration, led by Mayor Bernard Wagner.

In its “Demand for Payment” letter dated May 15, 2018, addressed to the Belize City Council, the Social Security Board is demanding payment in five days, otherwise they will commence legal action against the council.

Upon taking office, Mayor Wagner had asserted that his predecessor, Mayor Bradley, ran a financially reckless council that was not paying taxes, and was not making Social Security contributions for its workers.

Mayor Bradley disputed that assertion, and on April 30 he fired back in a text message to 7News, saying: “But there is a reason why he can say all those things, because records are there, and we ensured we ran a City Council that promoted and encouraged accountability and transparency.

“I still really stand by that as core principles of good administration. He can do an audit; he can talk about these issues; he can raise them, because the records are right there…”

As recently as May 15, the date when the Belize Social Security Board’s demand for payment letter is dated, 7News director, Jules Vasquez, said to Candice Miller, the terminated City Administrator: “The suggestion is that…the council withheld the taxes and Social Security from August 2017, and didn’t pass it on to central government and Social Security.”

Miller responded, “When I was there we paid Social Security, we paid taxes.”

The Social Security Board’s “Demand for Payment” letter covers the period November to December 2017.