BELMOPAN, Fri. June 26, 2020– It has been churning in the rumor mill for a few days now that Cabinet did not give the green light to one of Lord Michael Ashcroft’s companies, which had proposed an expansion of the Port of Belize Limited.

Waterloo Investment Holdings Limited had proposed a $200 million expansion on lands owned by the Port of Belize Limited.

The Waterloo expansion would have included a cruise terminal with multiple onshore berthing capacities, and the cargo-handling capability of the port would have been modernized with bulk-handling facility.

The Waterloo project has been in the pipeline for a few years now, and earlier this year, a high-powered delegation from the company visited Belize and made a PowerPoint presentation to the Cabinet Investment Committee.

Following the House of Representatives meeting today, Prime Minister Dean Barrow was asked to provide an update on the status of the Waterloo proposal.

“Government is not prepared to proceed with it at this stage. I don’t want to get in the details of the deliberations in Cabinet, and this not ought to be taken as saying anything more than at this juncture for all sorts of reasons. Cabinet did not feel that we ought to proceed. I really don’t want to take it beyond that,” Barrow stated.

The news of Cabinet’s rejection of the Waterloo proposal has emerged in the same week that Lord Michael Ashcroft appears to have beefed up his banking interest in Belize with the purchase of Scotiabank Belize Limited, through Caribbean Investment Holdings, the parent company of the Belize Bank.