Government invented a ?fairy tale? about investing $49 million in the Bermuda Housing Corporation (BHC), an Opposition Senator claimed, saying it simply wasted the money.

The ?investment? of $49 million into BHC was would not offer returns in the future, Senator E.T. (Bob) Richards said in the General Economic Debate in the Senate on Monday. ?It?s like if I had two bank accounts, one with $10 in the black and the other $10 overdrawn and saying I?m making an investment by taking the $10 out of one bank account and cancelling the overdraft with it,? Sen. Richards explained. ?The net result it zero.?

He said instead of this ?fairy tale? investment, BHC had blown $49 million of taxpayers money. ?Just imagine how many houses this $49 million, plus the $53 million wasted at Berkeley, could have built,? he said.

Speaking on the second senior school, Sen. Richards called for an independent expert to declare that the new Berkeley senior school is safe. ?It is not acceptable for the Minister and the Government to merely assure is that the building is safe,? Sen. Richards said. ?This Government?s credibility on this project is batting zero. The public demands that an independent expert declares, after an examination of the site, that it is safe.?

As a former Berkeley pupil, he said it was a tragedy that the name of this prestigious school had been so closely associated with scandal and waste.

And the Opposition repeated its criticism of the formation of a London Office saying the Bermuda International Business Association (BIBA) should have got the money to plug international business abroad. ?Just like tourism we need Government to take a somewhat passive role in international business and let those entities, those professionals that are in business, drive it,? he said.

Not even Tourism and Transport Minister Dr. Ewart Brown escaped the ire of the Opposition Senator. ?He believes he is CEO of Bermuda Tourism and he therefore makes executive decisions,? Sen. Richards said. ?He made a deal with Expedia.com without consulting hoteliers. He made a deal with this discount airline, the one that uses old Pan Am planes, without consulting hoteliers.

?He made a deal with the advertising agency Global Hue, which, according to its own web-site, has no track record in advertising for vacation destinations.?

If Dr. Brown was a CEO, he would have to answer to shareholders, stakeholders and employees and the board would have fired him some time ago, Sen. Richards said.

A press conference about the Renaissance Consortium being replaced at Club Med but Dr. Brown refused to answer questions was a ?textbook demonstration of arrogant opaqueness,? Sen. Richards said. ?The head of the new group couldn?t even be bothered to personally appear next to the CEO/Minister in front of the press and the Bermudian people,? he said. ?I guess he did not want to make the same mistake that the former Mayor made by appearing next to that same CEO/Minister. Look what happened to him.?

Hoteliers and restaurateurs did not work for the Minister, he said, and if they lost money it did not come out of the Minister?s pocket. He said hoteliers had become minions in Bermuda while the centralizing of power had become a hallmark of Government seen in the housing quango amalgamation.

The declining trend in tourist arrivals was accelerating, he said, while there were fears cruise arrivals would outstrip air passengers for the first time this season.

Sen. Richards said a decline of Bermudians in the workforce was from the changing of the economic guard: the rise of international business and the decline of tourism, but called Finance Minister Paula Cox?s attempt to blame the rise in non-Bermudian workers in demographic terms lame, nefarious, deceptive and disturbing.

And an increasingly long list of job categories exempt from a six-year limit on foreign workers showed it was fatally flawed, ineffective and harmful, he said, and was only put in place to score political brownie points.