The piece of land on which the Mahogany Heights Community at mile 31 on the Western Highway sits on is in danger of being sold right from under noses of those who now call the satellite town home. You heard right, even though government paid businessman Abdul Hamze $9 million for the land on which the satellite community was built, an ad appearing in last Sunday's Reporter Newspaper advertised the land for sale by its mortgager. The story is that government bought the land from Hamze, but no proper title search appears to have been done at the lands registry and it turns out that the land had already been mortgaged to businessman Johnny Kuo for $2 million. That mortgage has now apparently become due and since Hamze allegedly didn't pay, Kuo is exercising his right to sell the land.
7NEWS _today reached one of the mortgagers Ralph E. Huff and he told us that they are currently negotiating with government for a settlement. He also notes that it wasn't until they placed the ad that they realized that it was the same land as the satellite city.
What does this mean for those homeowners who live in Mahogany Heights? Well, by our read, the land they live on and have paid or are paying for is under claim and until government works out a settlement, Mahogany Heights stands on the perilously shifting sands of a valid land dispute.
It's just one more embarrassing revelation about the Mahogany Heights project, which started when government paid $9 million when its own ministry of Natural Resources valued the property for a third of that price. And then, it turned out that not all the land was suitable for development which was only discovered when the developers, Lupp Construction started work on the project which government says was $30 million but other sources put that figure at $50 million or more.
