Businessman gets 9 mths for stealing 93-acre property

A ST CATHERINE businessman who admitted to stealing a 93-acre property valued at $168 million from two persons in St Mary then sold it for $5 million, was given a nine-month prison sentence in the Corporate Area Resident Magistrate's Court, Monday.

Resident Magistrate Shelly Williams, who handed down the sentence on 57-year-old Camara Nkrumah, said she could not issue an order for the property to be returned to the original owners because she does not have that authority under the law.

However, she told attorney-at-law Franklyn Grenyion, who is representing the original property owners, that he could make an application in the Supreme Court to have the lands, located at Mango Valley in St Mary, returned to his clients.

Grenyion told The Gleaner, outside court, that he is already making preparations to file the application.

Nkrumah, who is from Tryall Heights in St Catherine, pleaded guilty on April 5 to conspiracy to defraud. Initially, he had entered a not guilty plea, but changed it shortly after the trial started.

The former school teacher devised an elaborate scheme in which he used a shell company he established to apply to the Registrar of Titles for a new title for the Mango Valley property, claiming that he had lost the original.

Within three weeks Nkrumah got the Registrar of Titles office to issue him another title, after he claimed the previous one was damaged by flood rains, then transferred the property to his alleged cohort 'for love and affection' before it was finally sold and transferred to a development company for $5 million.

She was amazed

Before handing down sentence, the resident magistrate said she was "amazed" that Nkrumah was able to conduct three transactions in three weeks.

"I don't know how this happened between the Stamp Office and the Titles Office ... how was this possible in any way, because sometimes it takes you up to 10 weeks to get anything out of the Titles Office or the Stamp Office, much less to get it done in three weeks," she said.

"I cannot even wrap my brain around how this is even possible," she said.