Seventy-five receive land titles

When the United Democratic Party came to power in February, one of their first decisions was to put a hold on the issuance of land titles and leases for transactions occurring between 2003 and February 2008. According to government, it wanted to conduct an audit of the Lands and Surveys Department to look for wrongdoing by the former government. This brought service to the public to a grinding halt. That process has now been completed and while there is little information on the results of the audit, today some seventy-five Belizeans who had applied in the same period went to Belmopan to receive the land titles from Natural Resources Minister Gaspar Vega.

Gaspar Vega, Minister of Natural Resources
“Because of the audit, we realised that these files went through the proper process so what we are doing is now we are preparing the titles and giving it to the people who deserve it. These are titles just from the audit. We have our everyday walk-ins that we are processing just as they come in. We are planning on doing this on a monthly basis for all those people with titles, we are going to try and do it as quick and possible because we know that a lot of people have been wondering when they will be able to get their titles especially those who consciously know they went through the process. Unfortunately they were caught up with the others that needed to be reviewed and that is just how an audit works.”

To clean up the backlog, the Ministry is hoping to issue at least a hundred more titles per month.