I have an odd hobby that led me to a new insight about the islands.
Though I am both a non-Brit and a nonlawyer, I like to read the judgments of London’s Law Lords or, more formally, those of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Law Lords are ranking British Justices, much like those on our Supreme Court, but as Law Lords they spend a bit of their time listening to appeals from small political jurisdictions – mostly current or former British colonies – all over the world.
One of my other interests is island governments, and one of the beauties of the Law Lords’ work is that it deals almost exclusively with island matters, as its jurisdiction rarely reaches any part of any mainland, save Gibraltar. Think of, from east to west, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, Bahamas, Pitcairn, Brunei, Mauritius and the British sovereign enclaves on Cyprus, among many others, including the B.V.I. All these places use the Law Lords as their supreme court.
The Law Lords sometimes worry about life-and-death matters (they are unenthusiastic about the death penalty) and sometimes about relatively mundane property disputes. The case that caught my eye a few days ago was in the latter category and involved a dispute between two (American) parties over what appears now to be a million-dollar residential property that is located, according to the judgment, “in the Beef Island Group [land] registration of the B.V.I.”
I will get to the disposition of the case later but what struck me was a passing mention in the judgment: “Before a Licence [i.e., title or deed] could be granted, Chapter 122 required the property to be advertised in a B.V.I. newspaper for four consecutive weeks to enable a Belonger to match the agreed terms.”
In other words, before any sale of real estate to an outsider (or non-Belonger) can be made, all long-term residents of the island have (apparently) the option of buying the property in question at the same price.
Such a provision calls for transparency in land sales and gives Belongers a chance to bid on every single property sale on equal terms with the outsiders. That may be little more than a gesture, particularly if the outsiders have much more money than the insiders, but it seems to be much, much better policy than the provision in the now-dead proposed USVI constitution that would favor long-term insiders by freeing them of all property taxes for all time.
Does the USVI have a similar provision for real estate sales? I live a long way away from the islands but doubt that it does.
As to the disposition of the case, the Law Lords “will humbly advise Her Majesty that [the prior owner’s appeal] must be allowed.” The queen’s agreement is, of course, a formality.
The earlier owner of the property and the purchaser both agreed, initially, that if a license could not be secured from the B.V.I. within a year of the transaction, confirming the purchase, the deal was off.
At first both ignored the fact that the island government had moved too slowly on that point but, after a while (and after the purchaser had spent lots of money on the property), the original owner called for return of the property (and the return of the initial payments for it) because of the lack of a timely land license.
The local courts had ruled for the purchaser but the Law Lords reversed that.
For the full text of the judgment, issued on May 7, see http://www.jcpc.gov.uk/decided-cases/docs/JCPC_2011_0086_Judgment.pdf.
