Jamaica’s Pension Fund Spent $3 Billion Renovating a Resort With No Value-for-Money Proof

• Melia Braco Village’s renovation budget approached US$23.5 million
• A further US$2 million in fees wasn’t even included
• Auditors found no evidence of a required environmental permit
• Record-keeping was too shoddy to fully investigate

A 2018 audit of the National Insurance Fund Resort Management Company Limited, a subsidiary of Jamaica’s state pension fund managing the Melia Braco Village resort in Trelawny, found at least $3 billion in what a Gleaner headline called a carnival-like splashing of taxpayer money, from a fund whose parent ministry carries responsibility for the country’s poorest citizens.

The approved renovation budget came to roughly US$23.5 million, or J$2.7 billion, a figure that did not even include a further US$2 million, roughly J$234 million, for architects, project management, quantity surveyors and plumbing services, among other costs the audit found had been handled separately from the headline budget figure.

Record-keeping was bad enough to actively obstruct the investigation itself: several pertinent records requested from the NIF and its subsidiary were never received, auditors said, limiting how fully they could actually reconstruct what had happened to the money, but leaving enough visible to conclude the fund had not received value for money, and that the ministry would be exposed to reputational damage if the findings were ever publicly disclosed.

The environmental compliance gap added a further layer to the mismanagement: auditors found no evidence a required National Environment and Planning Agency permit had ever been obtained for the renovation work, an oversight this publication has documented as a recurring pattern in Jamaican construction projects, from China Harbour’s illegal quarrying to CONNECT4’s unpermitted Jack’s Hill clearing, but rarely at this scale, a state pension fund’s own resort subsidiary apparently building without the basic regulatory approval private developers are routinely prosecuted for skipping.

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