Almost two years after it was granted a Court Order which is allegedly now being flouted by Pritipaul Singh Investment (PSI), Sterling Products Limited (SPL) is seeking to have the company’s Managing Director— Pritipaul Singh Snr—jailed for trespassing on land it owns.
In contempt proceedings it has filed against PSI, SPL wants among other things, for PSI’s Deputy Managing Director, Vishnu Panday, to also be jailed, along with its principals and or agents.
SPL wants the Court to declare PSI and/or its officials, principals or agents being in breach of a final Order made by Justice Jo-Ann Barlow on December 2nd 2020, instructing PSI to remove from the property.
The property at the heart of the litigation is prime waterfront Providence lands which PSI has been claiming from SPL and Demerara Contractors and Engineers Limited (DCEL).
DCEL—a subsidiary of Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL)—has alleged to this newspaper, that despite a similar ruling in its favour also, PSI continues to trespass on its lands as well.
In June of last year, PSI hit what was its most recent snag to claim the lands when the Court of Appeal denied its request for a stay of Justice Barlow’s judgment that it was trespassing on the lands she found to have been lawfully owned by SPL.
Two months prior to Justice Barlow’s ruling, Justice Nareshwar Harnanan had ruled in favour of DCEL, that the seafood processing company had also been trespassing on its lands.
In both matters, Proprietor of PSI—Pritipaul Singh—had mounted the claim of proprietary estoppel in a bid to hold on to the properties.
The judges, however, found PSI’s claim to proprietary estoppel to have been without merit.
Despite the ruling, SPL says that PSI is continuing to trespass on its property and through its attorney Nikhil Ramkarran, is now seeking an Order compelling the company to remove at its own cost the accumulated debris and all construction materials it has placed on its land, since December 2nd, 2020.
Background
As Justice Harnanan had found in the claim brought by DCEL, Justice Barlow also found that Sterling Products Limited had no knowledge that PSI had entered on its land and was doing construction.
The Court in these separate challenges brought against PSI, had found that the dense vegetation surrounding their respective plots had obscured vision and caused both DCEL and SPL from being aware that PSI was trespassing.
As it had done when approached by DCEL, PSI also refused to acknowledge that it was on SPL’s land.
To successfully ground a claim in proprietary estoppel—PSI—would have had to have shown that SPL and DCEL—knew of PSI’s presence and development of their lands and did nothing to assert their respective rights.
Declaring PSI to have had no legal rights/claims to the properties in dispute, both judges had said that there existed no evidence that either SPL or DCEL sat idly by and encouraged PSI to act as it did—by developing the lands—later seeking to benefit therefrom.
The embattled lands are plots F and F1 and Lot E of Plantation Providence, belonging to SPL and Lot W of Providence belonging to DCEL.
