3 months ago
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Senior Reporter
Former prime minister Dr Keith Rowley will have to wait until next week to learn the outcome of his appeal in a long-standing land dispute with a Tobago couple.
On July 3, five Law Lords of the United Kingdom-based Privy Council reserved judgment in the appeal filed by Rowley against Christo and Jocelyn Gift. The Privy Council’s website was updated yesterday to confirm that the decision will be delivered on August 5.
The case concerns a sizable parcel of land in Mason Hall, Tobago, formerly part of the 882-acre Alma Estate owned by Frank Latour. In 1975, Latour agreed to sell Rowley a 56.5-acre plot at a rate of $300 per acre. However, the land was not immediately conveyed, as Latour requested a survey to define the boundaries of the lot. He died before the process was completed, and his daughter, Marcelle Latour, was later appointed executrix of his estate.
In 1998, Marcelle entered into an agreement to sell the remaining estate lands—excluding Rowley’s portion—to the Gifts, at $5,000 per acre. They paid a $30,000 deposit. However, before the transaction was finalised, Marcelle informed the Gifts that the survey showed Rowley’s plot was actually over 85 acres. She proposed expanding Rowley’s portion and allegedly indicated she no longer wished to complete the sale to the Gifts, offering instead to refund their deposit.
The Gifts filed a lawsuit seeking specific performance of their sale agreement with Marcelle. Their claim was initially dismissed by a High Court judge, who ruled that the sale to the Gifts was contingent on final determination of the size of Rowley’s parcel.
Following Marcelle’s death, Graham Mitchell was appointed as the legal representative of her father’s estate.
In December 2023, Appellate Justices Allan Mendonca and James Aboud, in a 2–1 majority, overturned the High Court ruling and found in favour of the Gifts. They held that the trial judge failed to properly consider decades-old correspondence between Rowley and Latour about the survey and that this evidence undermined the claim that the Gifts’ purchase was conditional on the resurvey.
“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 (Marcelle Latour) and the Appellants (the Gifts) was subject to the resurvey,” Justice Mendonca said in the ruling.
Justice Gillian Lucky dissented, finding that the trial judge had acted correctly based on the available evidence.
During the final appeal hearing in London, Rowley’s attorney, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC, argued that the Court of Appeal erred in overturning the trial judge’s factual findings.
“The judge did take the correspondence into account, and there is no good reason, in my respectful submission, to doubt that,” Maharaj told the Law Lords.
Representing the Gifts, Senior Counsel Anand Ramlogan of Freedom Law Chambers urged the Privy Council to uphold the Court of Appeal’s majority decision. He argued that the appellate court was right to give significant weight to the documentary evidence, particularly since the case involved recollections of events from decades ago.
“This falls within one of the exceptions which justifies appellate intervention—where the trial judge failed to give due weight to contemporaneous documentary evidence,” Ramlogan said.
Rowley, who attended the hearing, was also represented by attorneys Dr Margaret Rose and Robert Strang.
English (US) ·