By: Staff Writer
August 6, 2021
Several countries in the Caribbean received negative notes on this year’s US Investment Climate Statements with comments ranging from a “history of corruption” to the “worst in the world” on the protection of property rights.
In this year’s report, chopped down to just a snapshot on where countries in the region stood on property rights, for Belize, the report said: “The Lands and Survey Department (LaSD) has a history of corruption, and there have been charges of land fraud, abuses, and cronyism levelled against the Department during each administration. Investors are strongly advised to do their due diligence prior to purchasing property.”
While the report lambasted the LaSD department in Belize, they were just as harsh with their take on The Bahamas’s system of land ownership where it said: “Despite the high number of second-home owners in The Bahamas, the country’s score for ease of ‘registering property’ in the World Bank’s 2020 Doing Business Report is 181 out of 190 countries. This makes it among the worst in the world. The cost of registering property in The Bahamas increased to 11.8 percent of property value, compared with 5.9 percent for Latin America and The Caribbean, and 4.7 percent for OECD high-income countries. The time to complete the registration process remains high at 122 days, and there has been limited progress in creating digital land registries or establishing time limits for procedures. These facts resulted in a World Bank ranking of 3 for quality of land administration (on a scale of 0 to 30).”
At the root of the Bahamian problem is lack of transparency in land transfers and administration in addition to slack laws as it relates to who can assume ownership. For example, the report said squatters do not have the right automatically to own land as there is no process for unoccupied land to revert to new owners.
The report was a little more kinder to Dominica where it said that there is a clearer process for land acquisition for nationals and foreigners in addition to the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming in a 2019 ruling that land unoccupied land can be transferred to new owners, i.e., “squatters.”
The report noted however, Dominica ranked 179 of 190 countries for ease of registering property in the World Bank Doing Business Report 2020 and it takes about 125 days to complete the five necessary procedures and the cost is about 13.3 percent of the property value.
For The Dominican Republic however, the US notes that little change has been made over the years to deal with property woes, exacerbated by “violent political change” which has made the land titling “complicated” in the DR.
“The Dominican Constitution guarantees the right to own private property and provides that the state shall promote the acquisition of property, especially titled real property, however, a patchwork history of land titling systems and sometimes violent political change has complicated land titling in the Dominican Republic,” the report said.
It added: “Land tenure insecurity has been fuelled by government land expropriations, institutional weaknesses, lack of effective law enforcement, and local community support for land invasions and squatting. Political expediency, corruption, and fraud have all been cited as practices that have complicated the issuance of titles or respect for the rights of existing title holders. Moreover, while on the decline, long-standing titling practices, such as issuing provisional titles that are never completed or providing titles to land to multiple owners without requiring individualization of parcels, have created ambiguity in property rights and undermined the reliability of existing records.”
For Guyana, as in the case for Belize, both of whom are on the South American continent, which means that they have not only slave descendants and colonial landholding legal frameworks and concerns like most other Caribbean countries, they both have to deal with the added concern of indigenous landholding rights of the native American descendants that still inhabit their ancestral home.
The report said with respect to Guyana, “Property rights are enforced but it is often time consuming to determine the rightful owner of a particular plot of land. Ownership of property can be unclear even among government entities and potential investors are encouraged to have a local lawyer review any potential property purchase before executing the deal.
It added: “Companies often complain about Guyana’s property rights being overly bureaucratic and complex, with opaque regulations that overlap and compete. Some report that this affects the proper allocation, enforcement, and effectiveness of property rights, as well as the efficiency of property-based markets, such as real estate and financial markets (especially primary ones, such as mortgage markets). As previously stated, the judicial system is generally perceived to be slow and ineffective in enforcing legal contracts. The GoG is the country’s largest landowner. Property can be reverted to squatters who have squatted for over 10 years, but in most instances the GoG repossesses the land.”
This year’s US Investment Climate Statements’ is a comprehensive look at how the US views countries around the world based on the investment climate and factors that affect individual investment regimes from corruption, to the financial sector, property rights and a host of other factors.