A fresh wave of leaked official invoices has reignited growing public controversy surrounding undisclosed and potentially improper government spending in Belize, with unusual formatting patterns and missing work details emerging as the key red flags drawing auditor and public attention. The newly released documents, obtained by local outlet News Five, confirm that the Prime Minister’s Office disbursed more than $1.5 million in total payments to Fast Construction, a company where Keith Mira—brother of prominent political figure Oscar Mira—serves as Senior Project Manager. This payment pattern aligns with previously leaked transactions linked to other members of the Mira family, including Jenny Mira, MP Farms, and Stanley Mira, raising questions about consistent irregularities in government contracting processes.
Of the 114 invoices reviewed by News Five investigative reporter Paul Lopez, only 10 totalled payments above the $10,000 threshold. The remaining 104 transactions all came in under $10,000, a pattern that experts and auditors say could be an intentional tactic to avoid stricter oversight requirements that typically apply to larger government contracts. Further, many of these small, split payments share nearly identical naming conventions: invoices for the same type of work are labeled with sequential single-digit suffixes (such as CIVILBATH 1, CIVILBATH 2, and so on) to generate separate transaction entries. In at least one case, two invoices were differentiated only by the use of a dot versus a slash in the identifying number, a subtle change that creates two distinct transaction records for what appears to be a single project.
The incomplete documentation surrounding these payments adds to the growing scrutiny. A $29,000 disbursement from the Prime Minister’s Office to Fast Construction dated December 14, 2021, includes no description of what construction or services the payment covered. Just three days later, the office issued a second payment of $19,687 to the firm linked to invoice number PMBZ-CDF, with similarly vague details about the work completed. It is not the first time Fast Construction has secured government contracts: the company has also completed projects for the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing and the Ministry of Economic Transformation. Notably, nearly all payments from those two government departments exceeded the $10,000 threshold, matching standard contracting procedures and contrasting sharply with the payment pattern from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Top financial officials have acknowledged the red flags raised by the leaked documents. Financial Secretary Joseph Waight told News Five that the irregular invoice formatting appears suspicious on its face. “I saw it for the first time. It looks questionable,” Waight stated in an interview. “In any computer system they read the fields and the number of digits and so, if you put another digit it is a new number, whether it is a comma, a dot, or a new number itself. But it took a certain amount of creativity” to generate these intentionally differentiated near-identical entries. The leaked records cover a four-and-a-half-year period, stretching from February 2021—just three months after the Briceño administration assumed office—through September 2025. Investigative reporters and auditors are now calling for a full, independent audit of all government payments to firms linked to the Mira family to determine whether any misappropriation of public funds or intentional circumvention of contracting rules occurred.