- New Falmouth Resorts owes $26.3 million in taxes
- Six consecutive years of unpaid property tax
- Land valued at $390 million, 260+ acres
- Five years unpaid can trigger forfeiture to the Crown
New Falmouth Resorts Limited, the company behind the demolition of homes in Coopers Pen, Trelawny, is facing a mounting $26.3 million tax bill on the more than 260 acres of land at the centre of the dispute, according to Tax Administration Jamaica records obtained by the Gleaner. The company, which acquired the land in March 2006, has failed to pay property taxes for six consecutive years since 2020, racking up more than $2 million in penalties on top of the underlying tax owed.
The numbers are straightforward: the land is currently valued at $390 million, with annual property tax of $3.4 million. Six years of non-payment plus accumulated penalties has produced the $26.3 million figure now outstanding, on land the company controls specifically for the kind of resort development that made the recent demolitions commercially motivated in the first place.
Jamaican tax law gives the state real leverage in a case like this. Section 4 of the relevant act allows the collector of taxes to sue an owner directly to recover arrears, interest, penalties and legal costs as a debt owed to government. More significantly, Section 14 of the act, read together with Section 6 of the Quit Rents Act, allows the attorney general to pursue formal forfeiture of land to the Crown once taxes have gone unpaid for five consecutive years, a threshold New Falmouth Resorts has already passed. Separately, Section 30 of the Tax Collection Act permits seizure and liquidation of an owner’s financial assets to cover what is owed.
The Gleaner’s attempts to reach a company representative, June Reid, by phone and WhatsApp went unanswered. The tax delinquency does not resolve the underlying dispute over the Coopers Pen demolitions, whether residents there had any legitimate claim to the land, or whether the company followed proper legal process in removing them, but it does add a genuine complication to a story initially framed as a straightforward property-rights matter: the entity asserting its right to clear the land has, by its own tax record, been in material breach of its own legal obligations regarding that same land for years.
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