Last week Mr. Vaughan Gill, the host of the People’s United Party’s The Whip morning show, charged that the Waterloo port project, which proposes to improve the Port of Belize to increase its efficiency in handling bulk goods and create a cruise terminal, is facing unjustified pressure from people in our country who simply have “feelings” against the man behind the project, Lord Ashcroft. These ‘personal’ people who don’t like Lord Ashcroft, they are not alone; three Prime Ministers in our country have expressed their displeasure with the gentleman.
Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel (UDP) privatized BTL during his first administration, 1984-1989, but he ensured that majority control of the company remained with the government and people of Belize. After a subsequent administration, PUP (1998-2003), allowed Ashcroft to gain control of BTL, and he and his group were ruthless and disrespectful in their administration of the company, a new UDP administration, 2008-2012, under Prime Minister Dean Barrow, felt it was obligated to take back the company, to end its rapacious practices and restore the dignity of Belizeans.
In her book, Still Waters — Biography of Manuel Esquivel with Memoire of Kathy Esquivel, Mrs. Esquivel said the former Prime Minister, speaking on the negotiations to get back BTL, thought “appealing to Ashcroft’s better nature was…a non-starter”, and after the takeover was completed it was found that the company was facing serious financial problems because it had largely been “hollowed out by Ashcroft during his ownership”, and profits had been “diverted as extortionate ‘management fees’ to Ashcroft-related entities.”
Dean Barrow thought Ashcroft was predatory. Michael White, in a 2009 story in The Guardian (UK) titled “Lord Ashcroft ‘subjugated a nation’, claims Belize prime minister”, reported that Barrow told British MP’s: “Lord Michael Ashcroft is an extremely powerful man. His net worth may well be equal to Belize’s entire GDP. He is nobody to cross. But this is our house, this is our country, here we are masters. And with the full weight of that sovereignty we must now put an end to this disrespect, to this chance-taking, to new age slavery.”
What Esquivel and Barrow experienced with Lord Ashcroft pales when compared to what former Prime Minister Said Musa (PUP 1998-2008) had to endure when his government tried to rein in the Ashcroft Group after allowing them to take majority control of the company. Before any PUP swears for Ashcroft, they should remember that their association with him led to the humiliation of their former leader, Said Musa, and their party, and their being out of government for 13 years.
On page 151 of his memoir, With Malice Toward None, Musa said his government challenged BTL’s monopoly, and his government did so because BTL under Ashcroft did not bring down telephone rates, expand telecommunications access across the country, or provide free internet to schools. In pursuit of those objectives, Musa’s government encouraged the entry of another telecommunications company, INTELCO, gave it a license, but their hopes were dashed by Ashcroft’s BTL. The Ashcroft Group blocked the rival company’s access to the Arcos Submarine Cable, after reportedly getting the UK government to pressure our country under a 1982 investment treaty between our countries.
Subsequent to this disaster, the Musa government moved to take back BTL, and thus began the saga with a certain Jeffrey Prosser, who got control of BTL with a “promissory note”, and for reasons not yet fully explained, reneged on completing the deal. Musa said, after the Prosser fiasco, that “we were placed in the invidious position of having to re-sell BTL to the Ashcroft Group”; that’s because, when Ashcroft’s Group agreed to sell its controlling shares in BTL, it was with the proviso that if the buyer that the government found didn’t pay up, the Ashcroft Group, Carlisle Holdings Ltd., would get the “first option to repurchase.”
When Prosser didn’t make the payments, Ashcroft had us over a barrel, and he was merciless. Was he about punishing PUP leaders who didn’t do his bidding when he forced our government into the outrageous Accommodation Agreement? Whatever, we the people are the ones who have paid, have been paying, through our noses. Anyone who cannot connect that Accommodation Agreement and other Ashcroft dealings to the 60% poverty in our country needs to go to math classes.
Some, who must be incredibly naïve, with little understanding of the power of money in a capitalist system, said when the Barrow government moved to take back BTL that the right thing for the government to do would be to let the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) regulate the company. In his memoir, Musa said BTL behaved “in a most arrogant and hostile way towards the government and the PUC”, that “BTL was presuming to increase rates (“rebalance rates” they called it) even though this was not approved by the PUC.”
The list of abuses by Ashcroft and his crowd is long, and they include ignoring the PUC; blocking interconnection to INTELCO; serious disrespect of our leaders; blocking Voice Over Internet Protocol; the Accommodation Agreement that gave the group a huge tax break; forcing out small shareholders of BTL; takeover of the Port of Belize and failing to invest in improving its inefficiency, a failure which led to bulk sugar being shipped across country by trucks to the Port of Big Creek – Toledo instead of by barge to the Port of Belize; efforts by the group’s lawyers in court to block an ex-gratia payment the GOB had made to struggling employees at the port; the incredible price we had to pay to buy back BTL; the projects we were to get as part of the deal that never materialized.
For all that, Belizeans who have the microscope on the Ashcroft Group’s request for clearance for an investment at the Port of Belize are accused of acting on “feelings” when they ask serious questions.
The project itself is fraught with challenges, both on the environmental and social fronts. A first EIA presented by the Waterloo Group was turned back, because it called for dumping 7.5 million cubic yards of dredged material into the sea between English Cay and the Turneffe Atoll. The group has now turned in a new EIA, this one calling for dumping the dredged material onshore, which could be disastrous for the Belize City sewer system.
If the NEAC finds that the group has sufficiently addressed the environmental side of the project, questions still have to be answered about the benefits the people would derive from it. One of the concerns if Ashcroft gets the go-ahead is that people in the area will be forced out, similar to what the group did to small shareholders of BTL when it was in their control.
If the concern of regular folk doesn’t register in the minds of Ashcroft’s apologists, it is on record that three Prime Ministers found the conduct of the Ashcroft Group shocking. Belizeans who are not in Ashcroft’s gallery know we have been burned before, over and over by this same man. No Belizean should trivialize their efforts to protect our country.