BEL­MOPAN-Prime Min­is­ter Dean Bar­row has re­turned home from the Unit­ed States where he held talks with In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) and the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) on the coun­try's mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar for­eign debt, re­ferred to as the "su­per bond". Last month, the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) coun­try was hand­ed a life line af­ter the gov­ern­ment an­nounced that it had been suc­cess­ful in rais­ing funds to meet a par­tial pay­ment on its US$544 mil­lion for­eign debt.

The gov­ern­ment said that the US$11.7 mil­lion amount­ed to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent of the in­ter­est pay­ment due to the bond­hold­ers, who in an im­me­di­ate re­sponse in­di­cat­ed they would not be go­ing to court for an ad­di­tion­al 60 days to al­low for the con­clu­sion of ne­go­ti­a­tions on debt re­struc­tur­ing. Bar­row, who head­ed a del­e­ga­tion of the Debt Re­view Team in­clud­ing, Mark Es­pat, the Fi­nan­cial Sec­re­tary Joel Waight and Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Glen Ysaguirre, said they met "at the high­est lev­el at the IDB with Pres­i­dent (Luis Al­ber­to) Moreno and a large sec­tion of his staff. "At the IMF, we met with Mr Min Zhu, who is the Deputy Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor, but the one in charge of the West­ern Hemi­sphere in­to which sort of con­stituen­cy Be­lize falls. He al­so had a large team at the meet­ing".

Bar­row de­scribed the talks as "ex­treme­ly use­ful" adding that the del­e­ga­tion had "a very use­ful and wide range com­pre­hen­sive con­sul­ta­tions with both in­sti­tu­tions". Prime Min­is­ter Bar­row said that "there was no ques­tion of a full guar­an­tee" re­gard­ing the debt re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise. "We have not asked the IDB for a full guar­an­tee. It is well known that we have asked for a par­tial guar­an­tee. And in­deed that was part of the menu of items dis­cussed be­tween our­selves and the IDB at this meet­ing.

"All I can tell you is that the process is very much en­trained; there are all sorts of pro­to­cols to be fol­lowed by the IDB. This is, for them, un­prece­dent­ed. And so the tech­ni­cal in­puts, the care that has to go in­to the de­ci­sion mak­ing process with re­spect to Be­lize's re­quest, means that it's go­ing to be a fair­ly long drawn out ex­er­cise."

But Prime Min­is­ter Bar­row said he was sat­is­fied that all the con­sid­er­a­tions that are ap­pro­pri­ate to Be­lize's re­quest are be­ing ac­tive­ly stud­ied by the IDB, re­it­er­at­ing that the talks "were ex­treme­ly use­ful". Asked whether he felt that a frame­work for re­struc­tur­ing could be reached be­fore year end, Prime Min­is­ter Bar­row said that "what's of crit­i­cal im­por­tance is the ne­go­ti­a­tion that is tak­ing place be­tween Be­lize and the bond­hold­ers. He said that those ne­go­ti­a­tions are like­ly to take place "on a com­plete­ly sep­a­rate, per­haps par­al­lel track from what­ev­er talks we have with the in­sti­tu­tions, with the IDB and the IMF. CMC