The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), the highest court for Belize, has presided over some high-profile cases involving the government and people of Belize versus the Ashcroft Group over this past decade and a half, and one constant is that we lost the ones that counted most. Another constant is that after our Supreme Court and Court of Appeal (SC-CA) rule in our favor, the Group appeals to the CCJ, and the CCJ overturns the ruling of those courts.
The BTL case doesn’t fit the mold exactly, only because we cut away and ran. A Belize government (UDP) nationalized BTL; the Ashcroft Group, the owners, were dissatisfied with the ruling of our courts (SC and CA), and they took the matter to the CCJ. The government (UDP), acting on the advice of its lawyers that the CCJ was going to rule against us, and maybe for a political advantage, cut away to a negotiated settlement.
We were told that the cost of the acquisition of BTL wouldn’t be more than $300 million; months after the negotiated settlement we learned that we would have to pay upward of $500 million, and some in the present government have said that by the time we’re through paying, interest payments will have taken the nationalization cost for the company to around $750 million. The negotiated settlement worked out terribly for Belize. It worked out well for the UDP, however. The party was able to win a general election, 2015, before the people found out how much it had put us on the hook for.
The Universal Health Services (UHS) case was another that went right at the Supreme Court and our Court of Appeal, and wrong on appeal at the CCJ. A Belize government (UDP) refused to honor a loan another government (PUP) had guaranteed at the Belize Bank, claiming that it was an entirely corrupt arrangement. In a nutshell, the PUP of 1998-2003 set about revamping the health care system, the primary initiative being to introduce a National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme to Belize, and somehow a new private hospital ended up as part of the tab.
Why we had to go overboard in our support for a start-up private hospital, when we already had private hospitals in the country, has not been satisfactorily explained. The start-up hospital, UHS, failed, and its principals, whom the UDP says were mainly cronies of the government, were bailed out as a result of a sovereign guarantee to the Belize Bank.
The most recent huge loss is the BISL case, the origin of which is an unexplained 2005 decision by a PUP government to extend the company’s contract a further 7 years, to 2020, when it had, just 2 years previously, in 2003, extended the contract with the company for 10 years, to 2013. The UDP, which was in power in 2013, thought the 2005 extension of the contract to 2020 was unethical, and it took over the company at the expiration of the 2013 extension. The Supreme Court and Court of Appeal backed up the government’s position that the extension wasn’t entirely proper, and BISL proceeded to the CCJ, where it found favor.
Fascinatingly, it seems that BISL, which managed the International Merchant Marine Registry of Belize (IMMARBE) and the International Business Companies Registry (IBCR), was running the businesses without any supervision from our Ministry of Finance, from its inception until a UDP government took it over in 2013. It is for the UDP to explain why, when it came to power in 2008 and found this lax system in place, it allowed it to continue until 2013.
The CCJ was set up for the single purpose of settling disputes between member states of CARICOM, but it also now serves as the final appellate court for four Caribbean countries. According to the report, “History of the CCJ”, at the website dpi.gov.gy/history, “Barbados and Guyana acceded to the CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction in 2005, with Belize joining them in June 2010, and Dominica in March 2015.”
One of the sparks surrounding the idea of the CCJ becoming the final appellate court in the Caribbean region, thus replacing the Privy Council (UK), had to do with the latter court’s handling of appeals of murder convictions. It was argued that a court in the Caribbean, with its greater knowledge of local values and customs, would better serve the administration of justice in such cases, and in many other local matters.
Speaking in 2020 on the favorable judgment that the Ashcroft Group got from the CCJ in the BISL case, then Prime Minister, Dean Barrow, said: “The judges accepted our contention that that contract was tainted with illegality, in fact, that that contract was unconstitutional. But in effect, what they said: well, the government ought to have tried to renegotiate the contract to see if it could be cured of unconstitutionality. I make the point: they don’t know the animal which we were dealing with.” (quote taken from 7News transcript)
Some members of the present government condemn the UDP government’s takeover of BISL, and in respect to the CCJ overturning the ruling of our Supreme Court and Appeal Court, suggest that the ruling of the lower courts was faulty, probably because the judges were being pressured by the then government. These same PUP members argue that the nationalization of BTL was unnecessary. They are yet to accept the extreme efforts a Musa government, PUP, made to wrest control of the company from the Group, an effort that for reasons not yet fully explained, failed.
During the latest meeting of the House of Representatives, where our leaders discussed millions of dollars we must find to pay Lord Ashcroft and his Group while we struggle with 60% poverty and a middle class that is forced to dip into its savings to make ends meet, the PUP refused to admit that a few of its leaders were naïve, and that at least one of them might not have been entirely sincere in his handling of the people’s business, when the party was in office between 1998 and 2003.
Over the years we’ve come to realize that when it comes to the SC-CA and the CCJ, these courts are looking at cases through very different lenses. Our Supreme Court and Court of Appeal know “the animal” we are dealing with. Lord Ashcroft isn’t an innocent foreign investor here: he is involved in political campaigns, he effectively calls our leaders liars, and wimps, when he doesn’t get his way. His Group scandalizes our environmental professionals and threatens to involve Ashcroft’s friends in the UK government in local matters. In a nation without any campaign financing laws, it is believed Ashcroft comes to collect after elections.
At the CCJ, such damnable and grotesque intrusions into the governance of our country are of no consequence in its decisions. Government leaders using the country’s assets to pay off their party’s political debts are also of no consequence. Through the lens of the CCJ, all they saw in this BISL case was a contract between foreign investors (led by Lord Ashcroft) and a Caribbean government.