Several people who own land along Southern Main Road, Claxton Bay, claim they are being bullied by men who continuously change their locks and put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs in front of their buildings, ordering them off their own lands.
The landowners say the men started coming to their properties last December and told them all the land is owned by a company called Morvant Building Construction Company Ltd.
For one man it has become too much and he is now spending thousands of dollars to install security cameras and employ a 24-hour security officer to stay on his property.
In an interview with the Sunday Guardian yesterday, Leon Lawson said he feels threatened by the men and their unexplained behaviour.
“It started on Christmas Eve day, 2015, I came and saw the locks on my main gate had been changed, someone cut off my lock and put their own,” Lawson recounted. “I removed theirs and put on new locks but the whole thing did not really bother me then.”
Lawson started constructing an apartment building last March and only received his completion certificate from Town and Country in January. The two-storey building was constructed on over 9,000 square feet of land, which Lawson said was given to him by his father. He presented copies of his family’s deed for the land and the completion certificate.
“My grandfather passed on this property to my father, who passed it on to me several years ago. It has been in my family since 1955.”
On March 5, Lawson said, he visited the property and saw his locks had been changed again and there was a ‘No Trespassing’ sign propped on his front door.
“I came and saw the men using a bolt cutter to remove my locks and placing new locks. They had a police escort with them and they came onto my property and placed the sign in front of one of the doors.”
He said he contacted the Couva Police Station and hired an attorney to represent him after Saturday’s incident.
“I went to the police and reported the matter, I got police officers to come with me to change back my locks and when we got here, there was a man with a cellphone videotaping us. He said he works for Morvant Construction and he was in charge of monitoring the properties to ensure no one entered any of the buildings. I asked him to leave and he said ‘Why, I doing you something?’”
Despite all this activity, Lawson said he has never been contacted by Morvant Building Construction or any attorney representing them.
“It is all very strange, they are saying Morvant Construction owns this land, they are talking about bulldozing my building, but I have never seen or been given documents supporting their claims. It cannot be that they are just coming here, removing my property, walking all inside my yard and they have no documentation.”
The T&T Guardian also spoke to another property owner, who asked not to be identified.
The person also owns an apartment building and claims their tenants have been threatened by the men and told to leave.
An inside source also told the Sunday Guardian that the compound rented by Super Industrial Services (SIS) in Claxton Bay was also locked down by the men.
On December 24, a security officer on duty at the location was ordered off the compound and told not to return and the locks on the gates were changed.
Efforts to contact SIS director Terrence Lalla for a comment yesterday proved futile.
The Sunday Guardian contacted the Couva Police Station and spoke to a woman police constable who said she had no knowledge of the incident or any report made about the incident.
However, the WPC said another shift might have knowledge of the report.
The Sunday Guardian made several checks yesterday for Morvant Building Construction Co Ltd but all searches came up blank.
There was no mention of any Morvant Construction in the telephone directory nor in the list of contractors on the Internet.
Searches done on social media sites also drew a blank. Several phone numbers, said to be that of the company’s director, were all switched off.