Court Blocks $2M Land Payout Over Duplicate Sale  

What happens when the government sells the same piece of land twice and taxpayers are left footing the bill? That’s the question at the heart of a major Court of Appeal decision that just saved the Government of Belize from paying out over $2 million. The ruling reversed a High Court judgment in a land dispute involving duplicate titles, an issue that’s plagued Belize’s land system for years. The Court of Appeal has reversed a $2.1 million judgment that would have forced the Government of Belize to compensate two men over a land dispute on Cats Caye. The High Court had ruled in favor of Rudolph Ramirez and Julius Zabaneh, who claimed the land was wrongly sold to them by the government. But the Court of Appeal found that the men knew the land had already been sold years earlier and ruled they weren’t entitled to compensation. The decision also clarified that a previous case involving Andre Vega shouldn’t be used as a blanket precedent. But this case goes beyond numbers. It challenges how far the government should be held accountable when land deals go wrong, and whether buyers should be compensated when they knew the land wasn’t theirs to begin with.