| Billionaire Blixseth, others sued for $1.7 million stamp duty | | Print | |
| Monday, 13 December 2010 14:28 | |||
 American billionaire Timothy Blixseth and others are accused of avoiding $1.7 million in stamp duty by falsifying the purchase price of Emerald Cay in 2006. The Turks and Caicos Islands government alleges that the real purchase price was $28 million but was reported as only $10 million. Instead of receiving the real stamp duty of $2,730,000, the government got only $975,000. The government is seeking to recover the outstanding stamp duty of $1,755,000 and a penalty of $7,020,000, plus damages, interest and costs. Named as defendants in the Supreme Court writ filed Dec. 3 are Blixseth, Emerald Cay Limited, Worldwide Commercial Properties Limited and Andrew Hawes. Blixseth's lawyer, Michael Flynn of Boston, said his client would fight the claim. "This is an extortionate attempt to extract money from Mr. Blixseth because he owns property in TCI while the responsible parties — the corrupt government of Michael Misick and the seller of the property — appear to have played some role in the original stamp tax transactions," Flynn said. Flynn contends Blixseth does not owe the tax, never signed the land transfer document and is blameless in the entire matter. He puts the fault on the seller and Misick's administration. He said Blixseth intends to "expose all of the corruption." Emerald Cay on the south side of Providenciales is where Blixseth bought a 30,000-square-foot mansion with 10 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms in August 2006. It’s for sale for $48 million by Christie’s Great Estates, which says the house also features a two bed/two bath boat house, a caretaker cottage, a 6,000-bottle wine cellar, two adjoining swimming pools with a waterfall, tennis and volleyball courts, two boat slips and two private beaches. The civil action in the Emerald Cay purchase is the first for avoidance of stamp duty by the Civil Recovery Team, which is investigating allegations made in Sir Robin Auld’s Commission of Inquiry report in July 2009 against the Misick administration and others. More stamp duty recovery actions are expected, the government said.The team of lawyers from the law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge already have filed actions to recover Crown land allegedly wrongly sold to developers on Joe Grant Cay and Salt Cay, and against one man for allegedly flipping Crown land to sell to a developer.
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