Training | 2009.11.28
Lord Ashcroft promotion threatens to create rift with Belize
Tories warned by former colony\'s prime minister not to give deputy chairman a government post
David Cameron was warned yesterday that Britain\'s relations with a key Central American ally would be damaged if Lord Ashcroft was given a government post.
In a stinging attack, Dean Barrow, the Belizean prime minister, depicted the billionaire Tory deputy chairman as a "relentless foe" and declared that a "state of war" existed with the peer.
Barrow told the Tory leader to bear in mind that Britain had a military training base in his country when he decided whether to promote Ashcroft after the election. The peer has extensive business interests in Belize where his father served as a diplomat.
Barrow said: "It\'s not for me to presume to advise Mr Cameron. All I can do is to say I would hope that a practical problem would be managed in such a way as not to damage relations between Belize and the UK. We wouldn\'t want to see institutional reels of collaboration and communication damaged."
Ashcroft, who adopted Belize as his home after his father served as a diplomat in the former British colony, has been involved in a bitter legal dispute with the government since Barrow came to power last year.
The prime minister this year nationalised Telemedia, a local media giant, after a row over an agreement reached between the company and the previous Belizean government. Ashcroft, who had relinquished control of Telemedia, advised it in its legal dispute. He has said that his advice was sought by Telemedia to try to resolve the litigation into which the company was plunged. It resulted in an "accommodation agreement" with the government that was upheld in the London courts.
Declaring that the wrangle had created a "state of war" between his government and Ashcroft, Barrow accused the peer of subjugating his country. "To insist on the imposition or the maintenance of an agreement that was quite clearly illegal amounted to a kind of effort to subjugate the nation to his will," he said.
"There is still this great thicket of litigation that\'s going on. He is obviously not going to go gently into that good night. He is a relentless foe and he\'s got all the money in the world and he\'s got all the lawyers at his command and everything we do he challenges."
The prime minister, who knows Ashcroft well because he accepted donations from the peer in the 2003 election in Belize, described him as a genial, but formidable, man. "Lord Ashcroft can be the most amiable fellow. Quick with a joke, sharp wit and he\'s obviously a brilliant man. But I think one always knows that if he is crossed he will get very, very, very angry in an instant and that he will be relentless as an enemy, that\'s never far from the surface."
Barrow said he was familiar with the power of Ashcroft\'s millions, which helped unseat his United Democratic party in a 1998 election. "We have felt the sting of his opposition and his determination to spend money to get an opponent defeated," Barrow said of the man bankrolling the Tory campaign in marginal constituencies in Britain.
The two foes have met during their dispute, and anger had been displayed on both sides, he said. "As things deteriorated [we] did meet on a couple of occasions to see how we could solve the problems and his anger was very much on display. But so was mine. So there was no real harm done. [It is] the kind of anger that would see him move relentlessly in this case to tie up the government and the nation in court."
Ashcroft says the attacks on him by Barrow are "entirely party political". The peer\'s spokesman has said that Ashcroft sold his interest in Telemedia seven or eight years ago.
The peer, ennobled on the advice of William Hague and who accompanied the shadow foreign secretary on a recent visit to Washington, is a controversial figure in the Tory party. Labour believes his donations give Tory candidates in marginal seats an unfair advantage.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats have tried to attack Ashcroft over his tax affairs. The Tories say they are satisfied with Ashcroft\'s undertaking, when he was appointed a peer, that he would pay British taxes.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/[...]d-ashcroft-belize-rift-warning
