The UK Privy Council will hear an appeal next week to determine the outcome of a long-running dispute over whether property owners at Britannia have the right to use a beach club and golf course facilities.
The hearing at the jurisdiction’s highest appeals court comes two years after Dart-owned companies Cayman Shores Development Ltd. and Palm Sunshine Ltd. won an appeal against a judgment requiring them to provide beach club and golf course access to neighbouring property owners as a condition of the purchase of a suite of resort properties, including the old Ivan-damaged Hyatt hotel and the now-closed Britannia golf course.
The Britannia property owners are now appealing that ruling, and Privy Council judges at a hearing on Wednesday, 30 April, will consider whether the agreements, signed between those owners and the previous landowner and registered in the Land Registry, are binding on the Dart companies.
The appellants in the case are the Lion’s Court strata, Damian Pentney, Filbert Holdings III Ltd, Garry and Karen Southway, and Bryan and Kathleen Murphy, who own parcels of land at the Britannia site.
The land in dispute, which was previously known as the Britannia Resort, was the site of a Hyatt hotel, two tennis courts, beach facilities, three residential developments – including Lion’s Court – and vacant land sold for residential development, known as the ‘Britannia Estates’.
Phased development of the site was carried out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the use of the hotel’s facilities and golf course promoted as an incentive for purchasers.
Starting from May 1992, agreements were drawn up between the developers; the owner of the hotel, tennis courts, beach facilities and golf course; and the owners of the residential units, which purported to grant those owners rights to access the beach facilities, golf course and tennis courts.
In 2003, the land containing the hotel and the golf course was sold. The following year, Hurricane Ivan destroyed the Hyatt hotel, which remains a derelict structure. With the exception of the tennis courts, the other facilities were restored.
In May 2016, Cayman Shores and Palm Sunshine purchased the land with the tennis courts, golf course and beach facilities. The owners at Britannia were then informed that plans were being made for the development of part of the land, and they were offered a licence to use the beach facilities and golf course. However, they argued that they already had the right to use those facilities.
Cayman Shores and Palm Sunshine filed a lawsuit and commenced proceedings seeking to free themselves of those obligations, arguing that they should not be passed on to the new landowner when the property changed ownership.
A Grand Court judge in 2021 found in favour of the Britannia property owners, stating that the agreements were legally binding and the companies were obligated to honour the commitments made by the previous landowner.
Cayman Shores and Palm Sunshine appealed that decision, and in 2023 won their appeal in the Cayman Islands Court of Appeal. In that judgment, appeals judges ruled that the use of facilities obligations had been incorrectly registered and should be deleted from the Land Registry.
The Court of Appeal justices said the rights, as registered, could not prevent the landowner from building on the golf course, and concluded that this was the result of an error in the legal mechanism chosen to protect those rights when they were first registered.
“Those entries are accordingly grossly inaccurate and give a very misleading impression. In our view the case for their deletion is overwhelming,” the judges wrote at the time.
Related Videos
