KINGSTON, Jamaica – Sugar Corporation of Jamaica (SCJ Holdings) Limited was complicit in allowing an illegal settlement to take root in the Greater Bernard Lodge development area, and also contributed to the ensuing crisis, according to Member of Parliament for St Catherine South, Fitz Jackson.

Jackson blamed SCJ for the illegal construction of houses on land, which is in proximity to the Clifton community. The land is owned by SCJ Holdings on behalf of the government.

Ten of the unfinished structures on the section of land that was set aside as a “reserved area” for the informal Clifton community that is now being regularised were demolished last week Thursday.

The demolition followed an announcement in Parliament by Prime Minister Andrew Holness that gangsters had captured and were fraudulently selling the lots. On Tuesday, he named the notorious Klansman gang as being behind the fraud.

When he spoke in the House of Representatives on Tuesday after the Prime Minister named the Klansman gang, Jackson insisted that SCJ Holdings was “not without blame”.

“SCJ knew this (the illegal construction) all along. Others told them, I told them,” Jackson said. The Opposition MP said he relayed the information to the SCJ when the construction started in 2021.

He told Holness that: “SCJ failed to do anything about it to the point where I alerted you that SCJ has been failing and continuing to fail to do anything where a new community is springing up and I can’t speak to it because I don’t know about it”.

“That’s why I go to SCJ who owns the land, it’s their land, they are the government authority and it’s their duty and obligation to act,” he said. He said he did not want any perception of complicity on his part in the public domain “because I reported it to SCJ and repeated it to them again when nothing was happening,” he added.

Responding to Holness, who indicated that some public officials had expressed fear for their lives, he said: “While that may be so, SCJ has organs of the state at its disposal. It has the investigative arms and it has the law enforcement arms at its disposal. It saw the problem emerging and mushrooming and it did nothing”.

“When one person starts doing something (building), two more, then four more and nothing don’t happen it is deemed to be okay because the authorities knew,” he added.

He argued that if the authorities were going to be complicit with the illegal activity then they should make sure they put in the requisite infrastructure to support it

Jackson insisted that he did his duty as Member of Parliament for the area to report the matter when it first emerged.