PROVIDENCIALES, Turks & Caicos Islands — Sandals boss Gordon “Butch” Stewart has scrapped a plan to acquire a property in Anguilla but says there will still be four additional properties opened within his all-inclusive resort empire by the end of the year.

Among those is the recently acquired Dragon Bay, which, Stewart said, will take about US$5-6 million to refurbish before it is opened in December. He will also have to put up the working capital for the Boscobel property, which is slated for a July 1 opening.

Cuba’s first Sandals, he said, will open in Varadero on September 1, while a third hotel in St Lucia will open on August 15.

Observer sources said the Anguillan government, which recently imposed visa requirements for Jamaican and Guyanese nationals, has been less than enthusiastic about the all-inclusive resort concept.

But Stewart downplayed that claim, maintaining that the timing was just not right for the deal, and the government had other plans for more than 40 acres of the roughly 50 acres of land in question.

“I think they wanted to make a golf course where the hotel is, and rather than get into any conflict and argument we backed out,” he said. “If governments aren’t excited about (a project), no problem, because we are busy, there is too much to do right now.”

With the recent acquisitions and the upcoming openings, Stewart has been busy reshuffling his deck of general managers.

“There have been a lot of changes with the new resorts so we are repositioning the GMs,” Stewart told journalists after Saturday night’s Sandals Ultra Awards at Beaches Turks and Caicos. “But we have always changed them. People that work in one place too long get a little stale sometimes… and then new fellows are coming into the system so they get the smaller hotels and these guys move up.”