BEWARE CARIBBEAN LAWYERS SEEKING TO SELL THEIR OWN REAL ESTATE TO BRITISH AND AMERICAN BUYERS

                            

If you didn't take the time to read our articles about a Miami civil suit against 98 Barbados government officials and attorneys, you missed one of the more important fraud stories to come out of the Caribbean in recent years. In a number of jurisdictions, avaricious local lawyers seeking their fortune in places where local landowners are traditionally uneducated, and attorneys enjoy privileged status, free from bar association and court ethical and legal constraints, organized real estate and probate fraud, on a massive scale, has resulted in their illegal acquisition of valuable oceanfront real estate.

These lawyers then want to sell off that property to foreign hotel chains, high net worth foreign nationals, and other affluent investors. Their ownership claims to that real estate is completely void, as they maneuvered title transfers through fraud, forgery, or internal manipulation of local real estate records. Inasmuch as there is a dearth of title insurance companies in these tiny countries, there's no way to reduce risk that real property purchases, even from professionals known in the community, will confer good and marketable title.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that we exposed this widespread fraud over in neighboring St. Lucia a while back; those articles resulted in an abrupt regime change in that East Caribbean country. Unethical lawyers causing rudimentary real estate records to be changed when they are handling probate matters of deceased individuals whose families have owned waterfront property for generations later find that attorney-criminals have caused ownership to appear in their own names, or those of their nominees, only to sell off former plantations to unsuspecting British and American hotel chains, who later learn about title issues.

When these Caribbean lawyer, flush with cash from the sale of property they claim as their own, seek to open accounts in UK and North American banks, compliance officers responsible for Source of Funds and Source of Wealth inquiries generally accept such deposits without question. Unfortunately, they are merely assisting these lawyers with money laundering, and reputation damage could ensure later when the scandal involving probate fraud abroad appears in the media. Beware lawyers from Caribbean jurisdictions with dysfunctional economies attemting to deposit huge sums in your bank.