LONDON, CMC – The London-based Privy Council Tuesday ruled in favour of former Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, in his long-running legal battle regarding the sale of a parcel of land on the Alma Estate in Mason Hall, Tobago.
The Privy Council, the country’s final and highest court, upheld Rowley’s appeal against Christo and Jocelyn Gift, ruling that the Trinidad and Tobago Court of Appeal had wrongly overturned a High Court judgment in his favour.
The appeal concerns the sale of land, known as the Alma Estate, which Frank Latour owned. In 1975, he agreed to sell a parcel of land on the Estate to Rowley for TT$300 (one TT dollar=US$0.16 cents) per acre. In 1976, a survey was conducted that identified the parcel as being 56.5 acres.
Rowley alleges that Latour was dissatisfied with this survey and requested a re-survey. But he died before any re-survey or conveyance took place. His executrix was his daughter, Marcelle Latour, and in 1998, she agreed to sell the remaining lands in the Estate to the Gifts at TT$5,000 per acre.
The agreement excluded the parcel which was to be sold to Rowley, and though Rowley and the Gifts paid deposits, no conveyance was completed for either transaction. In 2009, Rowley obtained a survey plan which, he alleges, addressed the concerns Frank Latour had expressed about the first survey.
The second survey fixed the parcel to be sold to Rowley at 85.6 acres, 29.1 acres larger than the first survey.
Marcelle Latour sold the 85.6 acres to Rowley, and the Gifts claimed that this sale breached their 1998 agreement. They sought an order for specific performance based on the first survey.
In 2017, the trial judge dismissed their claim, and in 2023, a majority of the Court of Appeal allowed the Gifts’ appeal against that decision and granted the order for specific performance.
But on Tuesday, Lord Andrew Burrows, who delivered the Privy Council ruling, said two of the three appellate judges erred in setting aside the trial judge’s findings, especially as their colleague, Justice Gillian Lucky, dissented.
“Although the majority correctly set out the law on the need for restraint before an appellate court can intervene in respect of findings of fact, the majority did not correctly apply that law,” Lord Burrows said.
Rowley’s attorney, the former attorney general, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC, had argued that the Court of Appeal majority had misinterpreted the facts.
“I would show that both those propositions are incorrect, first, the judge did take the correspondence into account, and there is no good reason in my respectful submission to doubt that,” Maharaj said.
But another former attorney general, Anand Ramlogan, SC, who represented the Gifts, had urged the Privy Council to uphold the appellate ruling. He said the documentary evidence carried more weight than the decades-old memories of the parties.
“So this falls within one of the exceptions which justifies appellate intervention, and if it is that the trial judge did not weigh in the balance, heavily so, the contemporaneous documentary evidence,” he said.
But in the ruling, the Privy Council noted that in its view, the majority of the Court of Appeal was incorrect to have overturned the judge’s central findings of fact.
It said that the “majority decided what was credible and reliable evidence and in so doing usurped the accepted role of the trial judge.
The Privy Council said it also considers it inconceivable that the trial judge would not have taken the 1980 and 1981 correspondence into account, saying that it featured so prominently in the cross-examination of Ms Latour and Rowley, including interjections by the trial judge.
“The transcript of the cross-examination of Ms Latour and Dr Rowley makes clear how central the correspondence was in that cross-examination and how alive (Justice) Kangaloo was to the relevance of the correspondence, as shown by her interventions,” the Privy Council added.
The Privy Council said it accepts the view of the majority of the Court of Appeal that it must have been possible for Rowley to have organised a resurvey many years before he did.
“But it must be remembered that Dr Rowley had already had at least part of the land being sold to him from as early as 1975. An obvious explanation for his delay – not explored in cross-examination – was that there may have been no pressing incentive for him to organise a resurvey, complete the sale and pay the price.”
and then 