By Belize Live News Staff: Twenty million dollars of the Social Security fund is heading for the Macal River, and Prime Minister John Briceño wants Belizeans to know he thinks it is exactly where the money belongs.
The Social Security Board has given public notice of a plan to purchase almost 700,000 shares in Hydro Belize Ltd. at $29 each, a roughly $20 million move that would expand the stake the fund already holds in the company. The proposal, reported by 7News, immediately raised the question that follows any SSB decision: is this the right home for the money of 190,000 workers and pensioners?
The Prime Minister’s answer, given to Greater Belize Media, came with a warning attached. The SSB, he said, is sitting on over a hundred million dollars that “need to put that money to work,” and the stakes of idleness are real: “If they can’t invest that money, by 2030 they will have to raise contributions.” The fund hunts for investments returning at least five percent, he explained, before delivering an unprompted jab at another national asset: “Unfortunately, BTL is nowhere near that and we have to try find ways we can fix that.”
The asset in question has a strong resume. Hydro Belize, the former Fortis Belize, owns the Mollejon, Chalillo, and Vaca plants that generate about a third of BEL’s power supply, backed by long-term power agreements and roughly $50 million in gross revenues in 2024. Government bought the plants back from Fortis in October 2025, and when it offered half the company to the public at $29 a share, Belizeans oversubscribed the sale, with about 2,000 individual investors buying in.
The counterweight is concentration. Putting another $20 million into a single company, however solid, invites legitimate questions about risk, diversification, and the transparency of the Board’s decision-making, questions being asked publicly as the purchase moves forward. A power company with guaranteed customers is about as steady as Belizean assets come, but pension funds are judged over decades, and the scrutiny that follows workers’ money is not a courtesy, it is the job.
The Prime Minister has made his call: secure, sound, and better than the alternative. Time, and the dividend cheques, will render the final verdict.
Where do you land, Belize? Would you put your pension money in hydro power? Let us know in the comments.
