Government Books $52.7 Million From Chatham Bay Sale as Deficit Narrows
The one-off land sale on Union Island is the main reason the mid-year deficit fell by more than half. Strip it out, and the government’s ordinary revenue fell while its spending rose.
The Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has confirmed that it sold land at Chatham Bay on Union Island for $52.7 million, ending months of speculation about a transaction the opposition had alleged was carried out in secret. The figure appears in the government’s mid-year fiscal outturn report, presented to Parliament by Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Dr. Godwin Friday.
According to that report, central government operations recorded an overall deficit of $57.78 million for the four months from April to July 2026, down sharply from $125.23 million in the same period a year earlier. The report attributes that improvement largely to a single item it describes as non-recurrent: the $52.7 million capital injection from the Chatham Bay sale. The fiscal accounts are stated in Eastern Caribbean dollars, which puts the sale at roughly US$19.5 million.
The word the report itself uses, non-recurrent, is the one to hold onto. Without that one-time injection, the deficit for the period would have been closer to $110 million, only modestly better than the year before. The land sale, in other words, does most of the work in the headline number.
Underneath the One-Off, the Accounts Weakened
Away from the Chatham Bay money, the recurrent picture moved the wrong way. Current revenue for the four-month period fell 10.6 percent, to $290.11 million from $324.38 million a year earlier, while recurrent expenditure rose 10.2 percent, to $344.89 million from $312.98 million. Interest payments on the public debt climbed to $44.28 million from $37.92 million, a rise the Prime Minister himself flagged as a concern.
The government offered explanations for part of the revenue drop. Finance officials attributed a fall in trade-tax collections to temporary reporting delays at Customs following a system upgrade, rather than to a real decline in trade, and noted that the 2025 figures had been lifted by a one-time collection of arrears on petroleum products. On the spending side, transfers rose in part because the monthly public assistance rate was permanently increased from $360 to $500 in January 2026.
The administration presented the overall result as evidence of prudent management and said it would keep balancing fiscal consolidation with relief for low-income households. That is a fair claim to make about the direction of the deficit. It is a harder claim to make about the recurrent accounts, which is precisely why the composition of the improvement matters.
A Contested Piece of Land
Chatham Bay is not ordinary Crown land. The roughly 100 acres were originally licensed to foreign investors under an earlier New Democratic Party government in the late 1980s or early 1990s, on the condition that a hotel be built. When that condition went unmet, the Unity Labour Party government under then Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves moved to forfeit the land in 2006, using a colonial-era law dating to 1922, and fought a legal battle that ran to 2013 against pressure from the United States Embassy on behalf of the American investors. Gonsalves has since described the land as part of the national patrimony.
That history is what gives the sale its charge. Land that one NDP government licensed away, and that a ULP government spent years clawing back, has now been sold by a second NDP government, under Dr. Godwin Friday, and used to narrow a deficit.
The transaction had been a live controversy since April, when Gonsalves, now Leader of the Opposition, alleged that the government had agreed to sell Chatham Bay in a secret deal at a reduced price, which he put at $63 million EC, and questioned whether proper valuation and conveyancing procedures had been followed. At that time no deed had been registered. The government’s own figure, $52.7 million, is in fact lower than the price Gonsalves cited, though it is not yet clear whether that number is the full sale price or the portion received during this reporting period.
A beach sold once cannot be sold again.
What the Report Does Not Say
The fiscal outturn confirms the money but almost nothing else. It does not name the buyer. It does not describe the planned development, or what conditions, if any, are attached to it. It does not state a total sale price if that differs from the $52.7 million booked. And it does not address the process questions the opposition raised: whether the Chief Surveyor’s office provided a current valuation, and whether the Attorney General’s chambers prepared the deed.
Those are not partisan questions. They are the ordinary tests any government should expect when it sells public land, and the government is now in a strong position to answer them, having brought the transaction into Parliament itself.
Vincypowa News has put these questions to the Office of the Prime Minister and will report the response in full, including any correction to the figures above.
For an administration that has repeatedly described the debt it inherited as heavy, a one-time land sale delivers real cash and a better headline in the same stroke. But the recurrent accounts underneath the one-off will still be there when the $52.7 million is spent, and Chatham Bay cannot be sold a second time.
Vincypowa News · Power to the People