Man wins lawsuit against sister over property resale promise

Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

A man has won a law­suit against his sis­ter over her reneg­ing on a promise to re­sell him a prop­er­ty he had sold her.

Last Tues­day, High Court Judge Robin Mo­hammed up­held Ram­sawack Bisses­sar’s law­suit against his sib­ling Poorandai Rag­birs­ingh for spe­cif­ic per­for­mance of the agree­ment be­tween them. The law­suit re­lat­ed to a prop­er­ty in Pasea Vil­lage, Tu­na­puna, where the sib­lings grew up. In No­vem­ber 1993, their par­ents gift­ed the prop­er­ty to Bisses­sar, who was their old­est child. Bisses­sar per­formed ma­jor ren­o­va­tions on the house. He claimed that he al­so in­her­it­ed a par­cel of land in St Au­gus­tine and be­gan con­struct­ing a house.

He claimed that he need­ed $300,000 to com­plete the sec­ond house and came to an agree­ment with Rag­birs­ingh in Au­gust 2000 in or­der to fi­nance it.

Un­der the oral agree­ment, Rag­birs­ingh agreed to pur­chase the Pasea prop­er­ty for $300,000 based on the un­der­stand­ing that Bisses­sar would be giv­en the op­tion to re­pur­chase it for the same val­ue plus any mon­ey she ex­pend­ed in main­tain­ing and im­prov­ing the prop­er­ty while it was in her pos­ses­sion.

Bisses­sar filed the case af­ter he learned through an­oth­er sib­ling that Rag­birs­ingh had re­tained a re­al es­tate agent to sell the prop­er­ty on the open mar­ket for $2.3 mil­lion with­out giv­ing him an op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­pur­chase it based on their agree­ment. In de­fence of the case, Rag­birs­ingh de­nied the pur­port­ed agree­ment and claimed her broth­er at­tempt­ed to in­tim­i­date and ha­rass her to ob­tain the prop­er­ty well un­der mar­ket val­ue.

In up­hold­ing the case, Jus­tice Mo­hammed not­ed that Rag­birs­ingh had failed to bring oth­er sib­lings to chal­lenge her broth­ers’ ver­sion of the events. As part of his judg­ment, Jus­tice Mo­hammed or­dered Rag­birs­ingh to pay $28,000 in le­gal costs to her broth­er.