- 169.5 acres of a sugar estate went up for auction
- A separate notice warned buyers the sale wasn’t approved
- Both ran in the same edition of the same newspaper
- The dispute traces back 20 years to the patriarch’s death
A running public notice offered 169.5 acres of residual lands from the Sugar Work Plantation at Lower Estate, St Michael, for sale by auction, put up by Michael Power on behalf of Denzil Power & Sons Ltd. Two pages over, in the same edition of the same newspaper, a separate public notice warned prospective buyers off the exact same land, stating the sale had not been approved by the company’s shareholders and directors and would therefore be null and void.
The dispute traces back two decades, to the death of company patriarch Denzil Power, after which Michael Power assumed control of the company and its properties, a succession that other family members evidently never fully accepted, given that the objecting notice came from within the same family enterprise rather than an outside party.
The parallel notices illustrate a distinctly public form of family business conflict: rather than resolving the dispute privately or through the courts before any sale proceeded, both sides used the same public notice mechanism simultaneously, one side advertising a sale, the other publicly warning it away, leaving any prospective buyer to weigh a genuine legal risk before bidding at all.
For anyone considering the 169.5 acres, the practical message from the competing notices is unambiguous regardless of which side ultimately prevails: a family ownership dispute this visible and this unresolved makes the property itself risky to purchase until the underlying shareholder disagreement is actually settled, since a buyer could end up holding a sale a court later voids entirely.
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