Yesterday we reported that there were major concerns that islets within the Hol Chan Marine Reserve were being surveyed and subdivided. However, the CEO of Natural Resources has bluntly stated that those islets will be sold to private individuals. Instead, he explained the properties would be vested in the reserve as a legal entity. But he said two of the board members had applied as trustees and that was also refused.
And today Minister Perez clarified that the titles won't be in any of the names of the individual board members. Here's how he explained it.
Andre Perez, Minister of the Blue Economy
"First of all I want to make it clear that indeed, the clarification to what your media house announced that it was going to some members of the board but to clarify that at the beginning, in the past, we tracked the history of these parcels that had been done and surveyed in the previous government however what we found that some of the parcels had been placed in members of the board but under some trustees of Hol Chan so really and truly at no time these lands would be available for these people use personally as such. And we followed onto it and we thought that was something good to do, nothing wrong with that, because we had discovered that these parcels had been parceled out and surveyed sometime around September 20th, especially those little islets, they were surveyed I think September 2020. Now to move forward we saw these parcels and we did seek legal at advice and at that point I got advice from my CEO that perhaps to be safe would be to put these parcels under the Fisheries Department, which of course is under government. And that is also a very good idea but while we were preparing these things then with legal consultation with the Ministry of Natural Resources, it was said that Hol Chan is a statutory board, they are able to hold lands in their name and that is what we started doing. And as we speak right now those parcels should be issued as titles all in the name of Hol Chan Marine Reserve."
Courtney Menzies:
"So it won't be in the names of the individual board members?"
Andre Perez, Minister of the Blue Economy
"No. We're already working on it in getting the purchase price for all of them, every single parcel and there's several of them, so we're doing the full clean up of all those parcels there and none of them has reached purchase price, all of them got stuck at inspection so it never went further than that."
"I can speak for this present board that are here right now, each of them have an impeccable record, they're well known in this community and that is why when I appointed these members, they're in good standing and none of them would want to get there for personal gain."
