“Cart Before the Horse”: Chamber Says BTL-Speednet Deal Skipped the Guardrails

Belize’s business community isn’t buying BTL’s timeline on the Speednet acquisition that the board approved for eighty-million-dollar.

The Belize Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) is arguing the country moved to close the deal before it built any of the regulatory protections consumers would need once it’s done.

BCCI President Giacomo Sanchez doesn’t dispute that businesses merge and change hands all the time. What makes this one different, he says, is the government’s own stake in the outcome, through Social Security’s equity position in BTL. He says that’s what should have triggered a slower, more careful process.

“The BCCI isn’t against any type of merger in business and interfering in private matters. But this is significantly of a private nature, given that government has a great deal of interest and Social Security’s participation as an equity holder in BTL,” Sanchez said. Consultations happened over the past few months, he added, but they never resolved the Chamber’s core objections. “We were still not satisfied that we were getting value for money. We were still not satisfied that the regulatory environment was there to give any comfort to consumers, post-acquisition.”

The sequencing is what bothers him most. Legislative safeguards should have come first, he argued, with the transaction following once those protections were in place . “We should have put in the proper legislative safeguards and guardrails and then we can see the proceeding of a fluid transaction. However, there was a rush and I honestly don’t know why there was a rush in concluding. To me it was more of a seller driven transaction, rather than a buyer driven transaction, which is not good for the people of Belize.”

Sanchez also questions whether BTL is even buying the right thing. Rather than acquiring another provider’s network, he says he would rather have seen the company put that same eighty million dollars into upgrading its own systems.

“I would have preferred, or at least if I was in their shoes, to be spending eighty million dollars on improving the BTL infrastructure, particularly in the area of the cloud environment. That is where some money can be made for BTL going forward. I just don’t see the logic behind it.”