Jon Llewellyn, the British adviser who was reportedly brought in to assist the Turks and Caicos Islands Land registry computerise the land records,
is now chasing land leases with a total of $3 million in default and is now promising new rules for Crown land sales.
Llewellyn has organised the systematic logging of all land ownership records. Recently, the third and more comprehensive registry has been
published and is available online. This record gives immediate access to the ownership status of all TCI Crown land.
Previous Minister of Natural Resources McAllister Hanchell had promised to computerise land records years ago but the programme was never started. In
fact, when Llewellyn arrived, he reported he found the written records in a shambles.
Llewellyn has hosted a number of town hall meetings around the islands, where he met with residents to discuss his assigned duties. The principal
discovery Llewellyn made public was that the previous government, led by Michael Misick, with Hanchell as cabinet Minister (responsible for public
land), had sold off most of the territorys thousands of acres of Crown land.
In the last fiscal year of the prior administration under the Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), which overlapped the incoming administration of
the Progressive National Party (PNP) for fiscal year April 1, 2003/March 31, 2004, sales of Crown land totaled $16 million.
The Misick/PNP administration took over officially in August 2003. Sales continued in the mid teens until March 2006. Later in 2006, an election
was nearing and, in February 2007, Misick gained a landslide victory, gathering 57 percent of the popular vote.
In fiscal year April 1, 2006/March 31, 2007, Crown land sales swelled to $55 million and, in the following year ending March 31, 2008, sales
reached an astonishing $58 million. Now it appears this figure (provided in the government budget reports) was seriously understated.
The record sales reported appears to be a reflection of activities by Misick’s government prior to the 2007 election, when they encouraged
people to apply for land. In numerous cases, land leases were passed out to prospective supporters without applications being made by the
applicants themselves.
The understatement of $58 million has been revealed in recent weeks by two land flip deals dug out by the Civil Recovery Team, who have indicated
that in two cases alone nearly $3 million in Crown land sales to non belongers were facilitated by flips in this period.
It is unknown how many of these flips occurred but, during the Commission of Inquiry conducted in the first quarter of 2009, two other flips were
revealed. These involved two former ministers, Lillian Boyce and Jeffrey Hall. These flips also amounted to a total of about $3 million.
The only portion of this $6 million in land sales that was officially reported and realised by the government was the significantly lower
assessed value, discounted with a 50 percent belonger discount.
The land sale of upwards of 2,500 acres of prime development land in Middle Caicos for less than US$3,000 per acre also grossly understated the
value of crown land sales. This land alone, at a conservative price of $100,000 per acre, would have yielded the government $250 million.
Private land adjacent to these blocks was selling at the time in the $300,000 to $400,000 per acre price range.
In the second part of this article the land policies of the Misick and Williams PNP administrations, as well as the previous Taylor-led PDM
administration, will be reviewed. Also the drop in private real estate sales affecting the income of the government will be shown.
