Ex-Prime Minister Dean Barrow is among three high-ranking, former government officials who will be summoned to testify at a Commission of Inquiry as Belize probes a flash sale of state-owned property, including motor vehicles.

Financial Secretary Joseph Waight and head of the Vehicle Care Unit Ruperto Vicente will also appear before the commission, which gets underway on Monday, February 15.

In a statement on Wednesday (February 10), the Government of Belize indicated that the Andrew Marshalleck-chaired commission will meet at Belize City’s House of Culture.

“In light of the existing [coronavirus] regulations, members of the public and the media will not be permitted to attend the proceedings, [however, it will be] live-streamed by the Government of Belize Press Office via its Facebook and YouTube pages,” the press office remarked.

Commissioners Luke Martinez, Marcello Blake and Chairman Marshalleck, who were sworn in last Monday (February 2), are to determine how Government handled the sale of assets from October 2019 to November 2020 and identify instances of wrongdoing.

The commission was formed on Tuesday, January 26.

The former prime minister is alleged to be at the centre of Belize’s ballooning debt crisis, precipitated by the negative impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Prime Minister John Briceño, in a statement to local media last Friday, accused the previous administration of the United Democratic Party (UDP) Barrow led until his retirement last year, of “plundering the Belizean economy” for the three consecutive terms it was in power.

The scathing statement came after the opposition UDP spread unsubstantiated claims that the Briceño-led administration would be cutting public salaries by 20 per cent at the start of the new financial year.

Three months after winning the 2020 general election and facing the worst wave of the pandemic, Briceño explained in Parliament this week that the budget for fiscal year 2020/2021 had a massive shortfall of $500 million.

The deficit was exacerbated by several multilateral loans from the Inter American Development Bank in 2020, which Belize, still reeling from the ravages of the contagion, is unable to pay. The current government had also observed several state-owned vehicles that were “sold” without explanation.

The Ministry of Finance estimates that at the end of the fiscal year 2019/2020, the CARICOM country’s total debt was $3.536 billion, or 90.9 per cent of GDP.

There are growing fears that when the budget estimates are presented in March, Belize’s total debt will have increased to about 130 per cent of GDP.