Privy Council rules in Rowley’s favour in land dispute

Derek Achong

Former prime minister Dr Keith Rowley has won a long-running legal battle with a couple over the sale of land on the Alma Estate in Mason Hall, Tobago.

This morning, five Law Lords of the United Kingdom-based Privy Council upheld Rowley’s appeal against Christo and Jocelyn Gift, ruling that the local Court of Appeal had wrongly overturned a High Court judgment in his favour.

Lord Andrew Burrows, who delivered the Board’s decision, said two of the three appellate judges erred in setting aside the trial judge’s findings, especially as their colleague, Justice Gillian Lucky, dissented.

“Although the majority correctly set out the law on the need for restraint before an appellate court can intervene in respect of findings of fact, the majority did not correctly apply that law,” Lord Burrows said.

The dispute concerned land on the 882-acre Alma Estate, previously owned by Frank Latour. In 1975, Latour agreed to sell Rowley 56.5 acres at $300 per acre. However, the land was not immediately conveyed, as Latour requested a survey to define its boundaries. He died before the process was completed, and his daughter Marcelle became executrix of the estate.

In 1998, Marcelle agreed to sell the remainder of the estate excluding Rowley’s plot to the Gifts for $5,000 per acre. They paid a $30,000 deposit.

Before finalising the sale, she informed them that Rowley’s portion had increased to over 85 acres based on the survey. She later told the Gifts she would refund their deposit instead of continuing with the sale.

The Gifts filed a claim seeking specific performance of the agreement. Justice Nadia Kangaloo dismissed it, ruling that the land they were to buy depended on the outcome of the new survey.

Marcelle Latour died after the trial, and Graham Mitchell replaced her as the estate’s legal representative.

In December 2023, Appellate Judges Allan Mendonca and James Aboud overturned the High Court ruling, saying the trial judge failed to properly weigh 1980s correspondence between Rowley and Latour.

“It was not permissible in the face of the evidence as a whole, which includes the correspondence, for the trial judge to have come to the conclusion that the agreement between the First Respondent (Latour’s daughter) and the Appellants (the Gifts) for the sale to them of the remaining lands was subject to the resurvey of the lands the deceased had agreed to sell to the Second Respondent (Rowley),” Mendonca said.

Justice Lucky disagreed, maintaining that the trial judge was correct.

During the final hearing at the UK Supreme Court last month, Rowley’s attorney Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC, argued that the Court of Appeal majority had misinterpreted the facts.

“I would show that both those propositions are incorrect, first, the judge did take the correspondence into account and there is no good reason in my respectful submission to doubt that,” Maharaj said.

Representing the Gifts, Anand Ramlogan, SC, of Freedom Law Chambers, urged the Privy Council to uphold the appellate ruling. He said the documentary evidence carried more weight than the decades-old memories of the parties.

“So this falls within one of the exceptions which justifies appellate intervention and if it is that the trial judge did not, in fact, weigh in the balance, heavily so, the contemporaneous documentary evidence,” he said.

Rowley attended the hearing and was also represented by Dr Margaret Rose and Robert Strang.