Last night, we showed you what Acting Prime Minister Cordel Hyde had to say about his ongoing struggles as the Minister in charge of the Lands Department and the Ministry of Natural Resources.
The latest dispute has landed the Ministry in the crosshairs of the Community of San Jose Palmar in the Orange Walk District. This community has an extended history in which the original owners of the community land obtained it from a private company in the early 1900s. The descendants of San Jose Palmar are supposed to benefit from the use and enjoyment of the properties. The Government is supposed to act as the Trustee of the land, and the Community's land committee makes decisions about how the land is used and distributed.
Well, according to knowledgeable sources, a piece of that land was handed over by the previous Government to an Orange Walk businessman. That businessman ran into financial problems, and his bank exercised its power of sale to dispose of the assets. We are told that the lease was sold to another Orange Walk Town resident, who now finds herself in a legal fight with the San Jose Palmar Community.
They take the view that the former Government did not have the authority to hand it over to the Orange Walk businessman, and now, the Natural Resources Ministry has supposedly compounded that wrong by turning the new owner's lease into a title. The two sides were reportedly trying to settle the matter out of court, for the sum of several hundred thousand dollars, but we are told that those talks have not yielded results.
Here's what Cordel Hyde had to say yesterday since that lease to title shift reportedly happened during one of his Ministry's mobile land clinics:
Reporter
"I know of a situation where a property was given to this person, but now, the lands committee in the village is saying that you had no right to issue title to this property because they were not consulted. They didn't approve it."
Hon. Cordel Hyde - Acting Prime Minister/Minister of Natural Resources
"The law doesn't say that we have to get the village committee or village lots committee's approval. They say we should consult with them, but they don't say that we have to get them to approve. Ultimately, that final approval rests with the ministry. We try our best to be as thorough as possible. We're human. So we may make mistakes because when we go to these lengths in one day, we'll delay like 150 persons and some of these people have multiple instruments to deal with it. So, you're talking about hundreds of instruments over the course of a 3-day clinic. But ultimately we try to get it right, man, and we pride ourselves on the fact that we've not had any duplications over the term of our administration, Absolutely none. And we have I don't know, seventy to eighty cases in the court right now because of those duplications."
We'll keep following the developments in this land dispute.
