BTB Eyes CCJ, After Court Loses Over Terminated Contracts

The legal hits just keep coming for the Belize Tourism Board. Another courtroom loss has landed and this time, it’s former IT head Norman Young walking away with over two hundred and thirty thousand dollars after the High Court ruled his contract was wrongfully terminated. And that’s just the latest in a growing list. The Court of Appeal recently upheld a massive payout, seven hundred and seventy thousand dollars, for former Director of Tourism Karen Bevans. And let’s not forget Misty Michael, the former Director of Marketing, who was awarded over two hundred thousand dollars back in 2023. It’s a costly trend that’s raising eyebrows, and now, Tourism Minister Anthony Mahler says the BTB may be taking its fight all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice. So, what’s behind this string of legal defeats, and what could it mean for taxpayers?

 

Anthony Mahler, Minister of Tourism

“Those monies have already been paid you know. These are not new things. What we did was to appeal the judgment and we lost. Now, we are seriously contemplating about going tot eh CCJ. We feel there are ground whereby certain things went wrong. If you read the judgment, it says that there was no board oversight in signing the contracts. That is a fundamental principle in this. You are saying there are issues elsewhere in this, the board did not see the contract, approve the contract and the chairperson or the head of that institution signed off on the contracts. That is the same thing that happened in the BTB. There were other things that happened in the past administration that we were left with. If you look at those contracts, they were unbreakable on one side. So it is not like that we are taking advantage of those individuals. The contracts were one sided in their favor just in the event that something like this would happen.”