And one thing the ministry also tries to avoid is huge payouts for compensation. IT's a daily problem - where government has to compensate landowners - who've been given a title for someone else's land, or been otherwise dispossessed at the fault of the state.
They recently dodged a multi-million dollar bullet when the Court of Appeals found that Acting Chief Justice Michelle Arana erred when she ruled that the government owed a real estate company called Ivorr Realty 5.6 million dollars for a large piece of land on Turneffe. The suit was brought by Olivia Villanueva, daughter in law of LOVE FM's Chief, Rene Villanueva. It made news because the judgement award was exponentially greater than the price that Ivorr paid for the land back in February of 2008 when it acquired 102.5 acres of land along the east coast of the Turneffe Island Range for the almost charitable sum of $27,300 dollars. The 5.6 million dollar award was recently set aside. The media asked Hyde about it:
Cordel Hyde, Minister Of Lands
"As I understand it, it gives opportunity to maybe have another conversation. It gives us an opportunity to amicably settle this thing without it costing the people of Belize 6 million dollars. That is my hope. Whenever these things ends up at court that we can sit down and say okay, you got a piece of land from the government and that piece of land turns out to be a very valuable piece of land, but it was given out to someone else and so we have conflict, can we sit down and figure out how we get another piece of land that perhaps is a comparable value? rather that unduly burden the tax payers of this country to find millions of dollars to pay for a land where at the end of the day it was national land in the beginning. So, we should be able to work these things out. We are not always able to do that, because some people have some...."
