Last night, we walked you through the land deal, which allowed Andre Vega, the son of former Deputy Prime Minister Gaspar Vega to make a major come-up at the cost of the government purse. For $15,000 dollars, Vega flipped ownership of a piece of land near Haulover Bridge, and he was compensated $400 thousand dollars from the Ministry Natural Resources, a Ministry which his father, Gaspar Vega, was running at the time.
Well, that’s only half the story, what if we told you that the Government lost an additional $400,000 which it had to pay to Sharon Pitts for an adjoining property?
She entered the picture before Andre Vega back 2011, when the land was actually owned by Russell Carlton. That land is a total of 2.75 acres, and it is located near the Haulover Bridge.
She applied in 2011 to survey the entire 2.75 acres of the land; that permit was granted. A few weeks later, a lands surveyor investigated and found out that the land was privately owned. In November 2011, the Lands Department revoked that Sharon Pitts’ permission to survey the land, which proves that the officials knew that it was private land that they are not to sell. They also had given her another permit to survey 1.5 acres, a portion of the total land in question. In July 2012, the then Lands Minister, Gaspar Vega, approved Pitt’s purchase of the 1.5 acres of the already privately owned land for a little over $10,500.
By that time, the Government was legally at fault for selling this piece of land twice, and on December 1, 2015, the Government had to compensate her for the entirety of the original 2.75 acres of land at 400,000 dollars. So, to cover that questionable paper ownership they committed to paying her 100 thousand dollars up front, and 50 thousand dollar instalments every month after that until the full sum was paid.
For the past 2 days, we’ve been trying to reach Pitts via text message and phone calls to her office number and cell number, and she has been unavailable. Someone did answer her cell phone today, and when we identified ourselves, that person hung up the phone.
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