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Matthew Vella
He’s the nephew of former Labour minister Lorry Sant, and like his late uncle, enjoys similar notoriety.
Hotelier Ian Schembri-Sant, 37, has been alleged to have paid off police officials, used bogus deeds, and accused of fraud and conspiracy in newspaper reports over the bitter feud between him and Italian Armando Casciati.
The major scandal concerns the ownership of a hotel in the Sosua township, on the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, when in 2005 Schembri-Sant was accused of fraud by Casciati.
Both were shareholders in hotel development company Sosua Oceanfront. Schembri-Sant had an interest of 15 per cent in the company, some USD4 million, but was accused by Casciati of attempting to take over all the company’s assets, by using a power of attorney produced by the company’s notary Wilfredo Martinez.
Guns and violence were reportedly the order of the day in the struggle over control of the company between the two shareholders, newspaper Dominican Today reported.
According to Jesus Almanzar, president of Puerto Plata Hotels Association, “firearms have already been brandished” and another shareholder beaten. The newspaper also claimed that since the early 90s, Schembri-Sant’s actions in Sosua included “payoffs to police and navy officials” to “violently ransack vendors’ gazebos in the middle of the night” and the use of “bogus permits and deeds of property”.
Casciati claimed Schembri-Sant swindled him out of half a million dollars, adding that the Maltese hotelier needed armed bodyguards because he “cannot walk around alone in Sosua for even one moment, they will kill him.”
Dominican Today also said Schembri-Sant once tried to demolish the Sosua pier with bulldozers in the middle of the night, but was stopped by residents. Some of the wharf’s pillars were heavily damaged in the process. Another publication, El Faro, reported that Schembri-Sant attempted to evict over a hundred families from the town of Cabarete and the removed forcefully the vendors from Sosua Beach to build a marina.
In another report by Dominican Today, Schembri-Sant was said to have taken over the Sosua Plaza park, which was donated to the city council by a Jewish immigrant. But since the authorities never claimed the title, Schembri-Sant managed to purchase the land from the donor’s heirs for 300,000 pesos (Lm3,200), the newspaper said.
Casciati accused Schembri-Sant of conspiracy, fraud, aggravated robbery and of falsifying public documents, in a formal action submitted to the Puerto Plata’s District Attorney’s office.
Casciati claimed Schembri-Sant had considerable influence with government officials, the Interpol, Immigration, the National Drug Control agency, the National Investigations Department (DNI) and Air Force general Pedro René Quiroz.
A district court later decreed that Casciati and shareholder Luigi Natela would acquire Schembri-Sant’s shareholding in the company.
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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