It is doubtful that anyone will have been surprised by the announcement on Friday in the House of Assembly that the former Bermuda Cement Company, now renamed Maxcem Bermuda Ltd., will not be required to remove the cement silos it leases at Dockyard.

That marks a reverse from the previous set of negotiations with previous major shareholder Jim Butterfield, whose decision not to relocate the silos led to the end of talks to renew the company's lease, and later forced him to sell his shares.

Strangely, Mr. Butterfield's departure seems to have solved all problems between Wedco and BCC/Maxcem.

Works Minister Derrick Burgess, previously a vocal advocate of getting Mr. Butterfield and his family out of BCC, told the House of Assembly on Friday that Maxcem would not have to move the silos, although he left open the possibility that this could occur at a later date if the Wedco master plan was modified.

Readers who have been following this long and tangled saga will recall that Wedco initially set down a number of conditions for BCC to renew its lease. One was that the company should broaden its ownership. Another was that it should move the silos, which was then required under the Wedco master plan.

Eventually, BCC agreed to these conditions, only to later come back to Wedco to say it could no longer afford to move the silos because the relocation costs were much higher than originally estimated.

That's Mr. Butterfield's story and he is sticking to it. Wedco and Government will argue that he reneged on his commitments and any negotiations with a new tenant, or more accurately, a new representative of the shareholders of the former BCC, should start from scratch.

What is clear is that Wedco, aside from whatever animus it held towards Mr. Butterfield, set down certain conditions for a new lease.

With a new shareholder in place, none of those conditions have been fulfilled; indeed, they are no longer even on the table, and the company now has fewer shareholders than it did previously.

That gives Mr. Butterfield a good deal of ammunition to argue that the conditions were only ever meant for him personally to meet, or alternatively were part of, in his words, an engineered effort to force him out of the business his family had helped to found and had run for decades. Somehow, this dispute seems destined to end up in court.

But one has to wonder what this means more broadly for businesses in Bermuda, especially for those who are doing business with Government entities.

Works Minister Derrick Burgess chose not to answer when asked by Shadow Works Minister Patricia Gordon-Pamplin if he agreed that the previous owners were refused a lease because they would not relocate.

But the obvious inference of the question is that what kind of deal you get with Government depends on who you are.

The predictable response to that will be that the United Bermuda Party did the same thing, and to the extent to which that may be true, the obvious retort is that two wrongs don't make a right.