In the last full week of campaigning for the municipal elections next Wednesday, March 4, the two camps in Belize City are scrambling to cement their positions on a variety of issues. One of those issues is the alleged corruption and mismanagement of funds by the Belize City Council, and particularly by Mayor Zenaida Moya.
Today the Mayor responded by telephone to Amandala concerning the resurfacing of particular allegations in the weekend issue of the Opposition PUP newspaper, Belize Times, for Sunday, February 22, 2009.
The Times published copies of 24 cheques in the centerfold of the paper under the caption “Moya Can’t Explain This?” All the cheques were made out to one Sharon Wade on the Council’s account at Scotia Bank and signed by 3 persons – the Mayor, the City Administrator and Financial Manager.
Those cheques, the Times claims, are for an amount of $108,775, covering services rendered by a trucking company owned by the Mayor’s brother, Sylvino Moya, between January 4 and February 15, 2008 – 24 cheques in 38 days (31 working days).
Wade was Sylvino Moya’s girlfriend at the time, and is currently his wife. Later media reports say that up to $250,000 was paid out to Sylvino Moya and Sharon Wade in conjunction with the cleanup project.
The biggest cheque of the 24 released was for $9,080, paid on February 4, 2008; the smallest was for $760, paid on January 16, 2008.
The cheques were first mentioned during a press conference last August by outgoing City Councilor Mark King, who at that time reported that the Council had not authorized the money and tried unsuccessfully to stop payments of the cheques by appealing to the Mayor.
King was prevented by his party from running again on the UDP ticket in the party’s municipal convention in October.
Amandala reached the Mayor this afternoon. She told us that 1) she accounted for that spending when it was first raised by Councilor King last August; 2) it was a series of legitimate payments for services rendered, i.e., the pickup of garbage from so-called “hotspots;” 3) the decision had to have been made immediately in the public’s interest; 4) regarding the public perception: “People don’t give a damn about how you get it done, just that it gets done… I did what it took to ensure that the Council looks good;” and 5) she does not think the disclosure of the cheques would affect her showing in the upcoming election because the issue was raised before her convention last year (which she won in a landslide).
Mayor Moya added that multiple streets were fixed with the money paid out to “many” contractors as well, of which Sylvino Moya was only one.
“We have been over this before, we went through all the expenditure when the issue was first raised… I don’t think this will affect the campaign,” Moya told us.
This evening, Prime Minister and UDP Party Leader Hon. Dean Barrow weighed in. In a telephone conversation the P.M. frankly told us that were he in the same position, he would have handled things differently – that he probably would not have considered giving out such a contract to a relative – but that “if the services rendered by the brother were done properly, and the charges were not too outrageous, then I can live with it.”
The P.M. added that his position now is the same as that which he took when the situation was first made public in August of 2008.