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Englebert confronts, contradicts Zenaida!

GeneralEnglebert confronts, contradicts Zenaida!
The controversy over City Hall’s failure to meet payments of Social Security contributions for its over 300 workers has deepened since we first reported on the story four days ago. Belize City Mayor Zenaida Moya told us, on record, on Wednesday afternoon that she was not informed that the old debt, dating back to May 2008, had not been cleared. But her former city administrator, Englebert Perera, visited our newspaper today and challenged the veracity of Moya’s claims.
 
At no time did Mr. Perera say anything to her, said Moya, telling us that the issue of financial reporting was raised around the time of their party convention when she was focusing on campaigning for the convention. Moya claims that she had asked him to come and report verbally (and directly) to her on the Council’s finances, but Perera never did.
 
Perera insisted that Miss Moya certainly knew about the hefty SSB arrears, because last August when the finance staff made an arrangement with the SSB to pay off the arrears, he called her on the phone and told her, and later sent an e-mail, including a spreadsheet with a financial forecast, indicating that the Council would have cleared the arrears by paying $68,000 every month starting December. We received a forwarded copy of that e-mail, which also went to other councilors at City Hall. We checked with one of them, who also said that the e-mail was received by that councilor, and it was clear that City Hall was in the red for SSB payments.
 
Today, Englebert Perera did the media rounds. He came to our newspaper after we called him to get his comment on allegations made by the Mayor, that he had failed to inform her about the SSB arrears. Perera insists that he did inform her.
 
More than discussing the SSB issue, Perera also presented us with minutes of the March 17, 2006, meeting of the Council, which stipulated that the mayor should have been getting a salary of $6,000, not the $9,000 she had been collecting.
 
This was a fiery issue leading up to last October’s UDP convention, when Moya’s fellow councilors asked her to reimburse the Council $90,000 they claimed she had overpaid herself. That simmering conflict fizzled out after the convention, however, and no monies were paid back to the Council. For her part, Moya said that there was an agreement that she would get no less than the former Mayor, and that was why she was receiving the $9,000 monthly.
 
Perera also raised the issue of Moya’s paying her brother in excess of $200,000 for services to the Council. He expressed the view that what she did was not in line with the Belize City Council Act, which, he says, requires a vote by the council to approve such large contracts. Perera alleges that Moya’s actions were an outright breach of the act.
 
Today, the Belize City Council issued a press release saying, “It has come to the attention of the Mayor’s Office that Englebert Perera has granted interviews to the media that contains libelous allegations against the Mayor. It hardly comes as a surprise that 6 days before an election, such statement will be made by disgruntled former employees.”
 
That plural “employees” at the end of the quote, we understand, is a reference to the fact that the Council’s former human resource manager, Christine Perriott, has also spoken to some of our media counterparts, signaling that the SSB arrears were well known to the Mayor and councilors. The Council’s release appears to also be an admission of this.
 
According to the BCC release, “The history of the Council shows that Social Security payments have always been irregular…. It must be noted that this Council inherited $307,571.31 of outstanding Social Security arrears, which the Council has since paid off.”
 
The release added that the Council “has addressed those issues raised by Mr. Perera on numerous occasions and, in order to avoid a back and forth, will no longer respond to these libelous and malicious allegations.”
 
Perera was placed on suspension with pay late last year, and was soon after terminated on the claim that he had been working and collecting another salary. Moya said that because Perera breached his agreement with the Council, he, in effect, terminated his own services.
 
Perera told our newspaper that he was advised that he had the legal right to do consultancies while on suspension. He had been working for Belize Healthcare Partners, and is assuming a full-time job in the finance section.
 
Moya indicated in an interview with us Wednesday afternoon that it was a gross failure on Perera’s part not to inform her of the SSB arrears.
 
CitCo Director of Finance, Dwain Davis, told us during the interview that he knew, but he personally did not communicate with the Mayor, because he believes that Perera was the one who should have, being his superior.
 
The glaring paradox about the latest controversy at City Hall is the fact that the Council has not been able to catch up with paying in deductions from workers’ salaries for Social Security and Income Tax, with arrears of nearly $400,000 total, yet Moya’s brother, Silvino Moya, and her sister-in-law, Sharon Wade, have gotten their payments from the Council.
 
We asked Moya to explain this, and her explanation was that she was “not aware of any payments being in arrears” and had she known, “that would have never happened.”
 
Perera insists that “black and white” doesn’t lie, and what he has provided in “black and white” is what he contends is proof that the Mayor was informed.
 
Of note, however, is that the payment of City Council bills fall under the purview of the finance section, and that there was no evidence provided by any of the parties that the Mayor instructed her staff to hold back on SSB payments.
 
Perera told us that the reason why SSB wasn’t getting paid was simply because the Council did not have the money to pay, but the Council had agreed to clear the arrears between December and March, and the forecasts he had e-mailed to Moya last August showed how the arrears would have been cleared with payments of $68,207 over four months.
 
When we spoke with Davis on Wednesday, he told us that the Council had paid $88,000 so far, but for arrears only, which means that even those forecasted payments are not being sustained.
 
The calamity seems to be a cyclical one, as the new payments due for ‘09 have also not been met, which means that while the old SSB arrears are being cleared, new ones are accruing.
 
The Council’s overall debt is roughly $9 million.

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