BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – IN response to questions concerning land arrangement for the Christophe Harbour development project, Prime Minister and Minister of Lands Hon. Dr. Denzil Douglas asserted that the selling of Southeast Peninsula lands was done privately and not by government.
“For malicious political reasons one would have heard that government sold out lands to foreigners gain at the Southeast Peninsula it really begs the question among people who seem to think that we are uneducated and stupid here in St. Kitts-Nevis because everybody knows that the government never owned any land there,” the PM stated.
Douglas went on to claim that parties guilty of perpetrating the lies of lands being sold to foreigners through government hands were in fact the real culprits.
“And so, this has been an attempt to fool our own people here that government continues to sell so many thousands of acres of land to white people from abroad to do the Christophe Harbour Development. Some of those who are banging their mouths and are accusing the government wrongly, they are the ones who collected the cash because they owned it themselves and try to pass it off as if government was doing something wrong!”
“The 2500 acres of land that are being utilized by the Christophe Harbour Development project those are all private lands. As you would recall, not even one square inch of land in the Southeast Peninsula was owned by Government; all totally privately owned,” Douglas clarified.
PM Douglas confessed however that there was one case where the government was asked to intervene in “a small area that seemed as though it was in dispute between two potential parties as owners”. He informed that the government was asked to purchase and sell the land to Christophe Harbour in order to facilitate the development taking place there. He stressed that apart from such involvement, the Government “owned no land there and all have been privately-owned and all have been privately sold by the KDP Developers who are there”.
According to Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Sustainable Development Hillary Hazel, lands at the Southeast Peninsula have been privately-owned as far back as the history of St. Kitts has been recorded.
“In [Robert Llewellyn] Bradshaw’s move to reclaim lands, those over the Southeast Peninsula were not included. The move was mostly to take the sugar lands to be owned by the masses. But, the peninsula was never used to grow sugar, so those lands were never under the ownership of the government.”
She noted however that the majority of lands on the plains of Frigate Bay are owned by the Government and is developed upon its prior approval.
The overall Christophe Harbour development project should include a world-class golf course, marina village and luxurious villas covering in excess of 104,544,000 square feet of land and 7 miles of beaches.
