15 Bus Companies Sign On to Form National Bus Company

Fifteen bus operators have officially signed on to the Government of Belize’s proposed Public Private Partnership for the establishment of a National Bus Company (NBC), with more on the way. That’s the latest update coming from the Ministry of Transportation. The operators formally signed a document committing to participating in the PPP between last Friday and earlier today. The Ministry expects that by the end of the week, the 18 who have committed to sign will have done so. According to the Ministry, getting the written commitment of bus operators is vital to ensuring that the process is transparent. Minister of Transportation Dr. Louis Zabaneh says that the hope is to get more than 20 of the 31 registered companies. 

Dr. Louis Zabaneh, Minister of Transport: “We have been working very closely with the operators and Friday and Today we have had them really sign on for this next phase really to support the phase that we are embarking on of the valuation of their assets, coming up with working through the auditors that they have selected to prepare the opening balance sheet for the national company. So we’re expecting that by the end of this week we should have close to the 18 that have already indicated that they are supporting this process. We wanted to be very transparent with the public in where we are and the operators who are supporting had no problem in singing on. Once we have all of them the 18 that we know are supporting signed on we will make that full available to the public, to the media. We believe we hopefully will get to at least 22 of the 31 operators and this is important because the bus association has been consistently putting out press releases stating that, it would imply from the press releases that all the operators are not supporting this process and the public needs to be given the accurate information that in fact the majority of the operators are supporting and we know have the two largest are on board which is West Line and James, they have already signed on. Companies like Floralia have signed on as well.”

The government intends to use the three electric buses as part of the fleet for the NBC. These buses were acquired through a collaboration with the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).