The question of huge multi-million dollar compensation for the shares of Belize Telemedia Limited (BTL), re-nationalized by the Government of Belize in August 2009, is back on the front-burner with the ruling by the Court of Appeal on Monday, June 7, declaring that the BTL Employees Trust, which had previously owned 23% shares in BTL through Sunshine Holdings Trust, is “valid.”
The trustees of the trust, former BTL board chairman, Keith Arnold, and former chair of the executive committee, Dean Boyce, issued a release Wednesday, June 16, saying that they want to meet with BTL employees and talk to them about the trust and the pending “compensation” for the shares (over 11 million), as well as having a worker representative appointed to act for them in all discussions with Boyce and Arnold.
However, Belize Communication Workers Union (BCWU) vice president, Senator Paul Perriott, told Amandala today that he does not buy the story. “That’s an Ashcroft ploy,” Perriott said of the trust.
“We nuh know nothing about the trust. … We have to see what’s up with the trust,” said Mark Gladden, BCWU president, who told us that he has not yet seen a notice for a meeting.
Karen Bevans, Chief Operations Officer at Belize Telemedia Limited, said that she heard about it on the TV news but doesn’t know anything about the matter and has received no notification at her desk of any meeting.
“Some employees called and said they heard something on the radio that they want to have a meeting next Wednesday,” Gladden recalled, saying the venue is reported as the Radisson Fort George Hotel.
“As the president, I have to go to the meeting to find out what they are talking about. We need to know the truth – the facts. If they say they have the facts then I need to see it.”
Gladden went on to say, “We at BTL have been bombarded with a lot of propaganda…” He recollected that under the management of Ashcroft, BTL’s directors, Boyce and Arnold, were telling them “how much shares we purportedly own.” They asked the workers to choose a trustee to decide how they will share the value of the trust: $85 million.
“There are employees there who will believe that there is manna from heaven,” Gladden said.
Dean Boyce told a local TV station Monday that the 23% stake in BTL has a value of $85 million, after the debts are removed. This, he said, is based on $500 million dollar value affixed to BTL—a price tag which the Barrow administration has gone on record to say is grossly inflated because it factors in the accommodation agreement given by the Said Musa administration, which this administration has not accepted as legal and binding.
The $85 million split among 500 BTL workers yields a tidy sum of $170,000 a head, if the benefits were to be equally apportioned. BTL has about 500 employees, including management, and 342 are members of the BCWU.
Perriott said that some workers have called him to ask what he will do with his $100,000, adding that some might indeed be tempted by the money to buy into the trust. He recalls, however, that the trust owes tens of millions of dollars, and at one time, it was reported that it has a $50 million debt with the Belize Bank, another Ashcroft-controlled company.
“We know it will be a different figure [than $85 million],” commented Gladden, who expects the trust to be ‘in the red’. “That’s why we have to find out more and move very cautiously in trying to figure out exactly what steps need to be taken.”
He told Amandala that the BCWU has already done consultations with workers all across the country to find out how to respond to the matter, and the union is now looking for a lawyer to assess the legality of the situation.
Even though a press release from trustees Keith Arnold and Dean Boyce claims that the trust was set up in 2005, Gladden said workers and the union have yet to see the documents. “That’s going to be my first question,” Gladden said. It’s been nearly five years now and they have not seen the documents, says the union; neither have they received any financial benefit to date, according to Senator Perriott.
Perriott reports that since the inception of the trust, those shares have netted $18 million in dividends – $4 million under the Barrow administration – and the union has not seen a dollar.
Perriott says that if the Barrow administration were serious about giving the workers a stake in BTL, they would have given the shares, now under GOB’s ownership, to the workers.
“We would like to do our own trust,” said Gladden, adding that they are still interested in owning shares in BTL, “even if we have to borrow the money.”
Senator Perriott, as well as his wife Christine Perriott, former General-Secretary of the Belize Communications Workers Union, told our newspaper that even before the BTL Employees Trust was formed by the directors under Ashcroft’s control, the union had moved to establish their own trust, the BTL Workers Trust.
That trust was supposed to acquire the 23% shares in BTL, and had even been in talks with ex-Prime Minister Said Musa, as well as former Attorney Generals Francis Fonseca and Godfrey Smith, on the matter, said Mrs. Perriott. The BTL workers were in the process of getting a loan from the Belize Social Security Board to buy the shares, she recalled. Instead, though, it was the Ashcroft-registered trust that got the shares as well as the Government loans. Under the Musa administration scheme, the shares were purchased by the Boyce/Arnold/Ashcroft trust using a syndicated loan from Central Government and Social Security, which supplied $10 million each on concessionary terms, and the Belize Bank, which provided the remaining $20 million to make up the $40 million price tag for the BTL shares.