By Barbara Gayle, Staff ReporterSQUATTERS ON property belonging to Mammee Bay Resorts Limited in St. Ann will have to vacate the land or face eviction following a Supreme Court ruling yesterday turning down their application for an order to stop the owners from evicting them.
"We honestly need to send a strong message to people who believe they can occupy land unlawfully and this is exactly what the judge did," Lyttleton Shirley, managing director of Mammee Bay Resorts Ltd., told The Gleaner yesterday. He said the legal costs incurred to defend the matter could have been used to assist the squatters with their relocation.
"We offered to assist them with their relocation but they blatantly refused," Mr. Shirley said.
ADVERSE POSSESSION
Mrs. Justice Carol Beswick heard legal arguments in chambers in May and reserved her decision until yesterday when she refused to grant an injunction.
The squatters had applied in May for an injunction to bar the owners from evicting them until suits they had filed in the Supreme Court for adverse possession of the property had been heard and determined.
Mammee Bay Resorts Ltd., which is being represented by Hilary Phillips, Q.C., and attorney-at-law Kipcho West, had opposed the application.
Gregory Crosbie, who brought the suit on behalf of the squatters, is contending that his grandfather occupied a five-acre plot on the property from 1960 until his death in 2000. Crosbie is claiming the portion of the land on which his grandfather lived on the grounds of adverse possession.
AWAITING OUTCOME
The other squatters are awaiting the outcome of the suit that Crosbie has brought against Mammee Bay Resorts Ltd., and its managing director.
The squatters, who occupy part of the beach front property along the Mammee Bay main road, were served eviction notices in January. When some of them refused, a security company evicted about 40 squatters on May 11.
Mammee Bay Resorts Limited is contending that the squatters are not entitled to adverse possession. The company bought the land in 1996 from NCB Investments Ltd. to build a 354-room all-inclusive resort hotel. The hotel is projected to earn net foreign exchange of US$15 million to US$19 million per annum, and employ between 500 and 700 people.
