Anwar’s Accommodation Agreement?

Is the PM’s Son a Silent Partner?

Belize City, Thursday, November 12, 2009

The decision by the Government of Belize to put the Boledo and Sunday Lottery into private management was leaked following last week’s Cabinet meeting, but it was not until Monday, November 9^th, that the nation was officially informed via a release from the Ministry of Economic Development that this was indeed the case.

As far back as early March, the Belize Times broke the story that the son of Prime Minister Dean Barrow, Anwar, had joined forces with Brads and that they had already been given confirmation that the monopoly on Boledo would be gifted to them. There has been no denial of this report, and the Times calls on the Prime Minister to publicly confirm or deny these allegations.

In an interview with LOVE FM this week the Auditor General Edmund Zuniga defended the process and the choice as above board and fair, saying that they had “looked at the fact that at the end of the ten year period government would earn more from the profit sharing and the taxation and so on that will come out of Brads that they would have out of the other company.”

He revealed that there had been bids by two other companies, Print Belize Limited and Tropical Gaming Company, the operators of the Lotto in Belize the past decade or so.

He did not reveal exactly what had been proposed by any of the tenders.

It has been reported that an appointed six-man Lotteries Tender Committee chaired by Zuniga and which included Senator Godwin Hulse, Lita Perez from the Ministry of Finance, Dwayne Samuels and Paul DeeHan from the Lotteries Committee and Alfred Slather, of the Gaming Control Board oversaw the process and considered the proposals before making the recommendation.

There is still no public understanding of what exactly is being proposed and what its implementation will mean for the many people who make a living from sales of tickers, particularly in the rural areas of the country.

According to the official release the government is hoping to increase the revenue take from the games from just under a million dollars per year, to a guaranteed two million dollars annually under the new management through operating fees, profit sharing arrangements and business tax and the privatization is expected to come into effect on April first, 2010.

The release also said that the games will transition to an electronic system of lottery ticket sales over the period of a year after the private administration begins

The new administrators and GOB are also supposed to undertake several public education campaigns to make all interested parties aware of the changes and the details of private administration.

The entire process and the decision have raised several questions. For example, if the bids were evaluated on the basis of the companies’ human expertise and technological capacity to manage the lotteries program, then clearly the company that has been operating an electronic lottery for more than a decade in Belize should have had an edge over a company that has never operated or managed any form of lottery.

Tropical Gaming Company’s international partners also operate a similar two-digit lottery in neighbouring Honduras as well.

But for many Belizeans awarding the contract to Brads smacks of cronyism since many members of the upper hierarchy of the Barrow Administration, including several members of Cabinet and even the prime minister himself, hang out weekly in front of Brads Farmers Market store.

It has also been reported that Brads has been a key campaign funds contributor to the UDP, and to several candidates.

And it rankles that the amount of money Government has been able to collect from the games have decreased drastically over the past two years, and it is obvious that this is because the majority Chinese sellers are not buying and using the books printed by the government of Belize, whose sales form the majority of the revenue GOB derives from the game.

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