A Canadian woman living in Fiji has been forcibly deported just hours after appearing before a parliamentary select committee.
Karen Seaton, who holds a Fiji residency permit, was taken from her Suva hotel and forced onto a plane to Los Angeles without any explanation.
Ben Robinson Drawbridge reports.
Scarcity of building resources following Cyclone Winston has made it difficult for non-resident landowners to build by the end of the year.
Photo: RNZI/Alex Perrottet
Transcript
Karen Seaton had made a verbal submission to the committee on behalf of expat landowners affected by changes to the Land Sales Act. Act 16 requires all non-resident land owners to construct a $US120,000 dwelling by the end of the year or pay a fine every six months equal to 10 percent of the value of their land. Miss Seaton says she was taken from her Suva hotel room on Friday night by immigration officials.
"They broke into the room and at that point I made a formal request for an ambassador. It was denied. They forcibly twisted my arm to remove my phone from me and they forcibly took my purse from me to take my passports. At one point I asked why was I being deported and she said it's from the highest authority in the nation."
Karen Seaton's submission had been facilitated by the former opposition leader Mick Beddoes. He says Act 16 applied retrospectively to all non-resident land owners when it was introduced in 2014.
"And most of these people are abroad and they're planning to come and retire on their plots of land that they bought for their retirement. And we all know that retirees don't have a whole swag of money. This idea of forcing people to build a quarter of a million dollar home when if you're retiring in the country side you need a nice, comfortable little cottage that'll probably cost you less than half of that. And why would you penalise a group of people and not apply it across the board to everybody. That is just unjust and unfair."
About 5,000 expat property owners are represented by the Fiji Land Owners Association. Its US-based founder Dave Rand says Act 16 targets mostly white land owners as well as Fiji's property market.
"There's another motive far more sinister than what would appear on the surface and that was to artificially crash a real estate market and then get people to conduct a fire sale which is going on now. Places are being sold for a fraction of the value they were 10 years ago. And low and behold the people that are scooping up the properties in this fire sale are mostly Chinese and local Fijians, or Chinese going through local Fijians to avoid any circumstances going forward."
Mick Beddoes says wealthy Fijians will buy up the land sold by expats as he suspects the government will soon relax restrictions of land sales abroad.
"They are forcing the sale of this land to locals and only certain locals can buy it. It wouldn't surprises me that before the 2018 general election a new bill will come in to relax the restriction of selling abroad and that's just daylight robbery."
Fiji's acting prime minister Aiyaz Sayed-Kaiyum did not respond to requests for comment.
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