Net News Publisher Desmond Seales said his paper may be down but not out.
According to reports from the Cayman Islands, staff at the paper arrived to work last Tuesday morning to find the locks changed in the office and a notice from the landlord pasted inside the glass front door stating he had repossessed the building.
They were given half an hour to pick up their personal belongings from the office.
Lawyer Christopher McDuff from the Thorp Alberga law firm, acting on behalf of landlord Alissta Towers Ltd., said: “We have taken possession of the property pursuant to the consent order entered into by the tenant Cayman Net Ltd., and approved in October 2009.
“We say that the tenant Cayman Net Ltd. has breached that order and so... we have taken possession.”
Mr. McDuff would not say when the company last paid rent to the landlord.
A writ of summons filed at the Grand Court in August showed that Cayman Net Ltd. owed the landlord more than $50,000 at that time.
It listed details of 11 dishonoured cheques which Cayman Net News or its sister marketing company MCM Consultants had paid to Alissta Towers Ltd. between 30 April and 3 July.
The newspaper has lost several members of staff recently, some of whom have filed complaints about non–payment of wages to the Department of Employment Relations.
Net News Publisher Desmond Seales said his paper may be down but not out.
Seales, a veteran Caribbean publisher, claims that he is the victim of political high-handedness and that he is being targeted by Cayman Islands Premier-designate McKeeva Bush, who Seales once advised politically. The two are now arch-enemies.
Caribbean Net News and Turks and Caicos Net News have repeatedly carried many negative reports about the Turks and Caicos Islands and has often been criticised as being more critical of the TCI than of the Cayman Islands where it is based.
It is a regular outlet for outgoing People’s Democratic Movement (PDM) leader Floyd Seymour and some of his other party colleagues.
Net News’ main writer and contributor from the Turks and Caicos Islands is a Mr. David Tapfer, an opinionated, geriatric scribe and retired American engineer who lives in Middle Caicos and who masquerades as a journalist and is known to be a staunch supporter of the PDM.
Tapfer, who is a Belonger, is the chairman of the PDM’s Middle Caicos Branch, and is one of the party’s attack dogs.
Prior to August 14 when parts of the Constitution were suspended, Tapfer spent most of his time criticizing the PNP on Caribbean Net news and praising the PDM, while waging what was widely believed to be a quiet, veiled campaign to be a part of the Interim Government. However, much to his chagrin, he was overlooked by Governor Gordon Wetherell.
Sources in Middle Caicos said this exclusion from the Interim Government, among other things, made Tapfer so sick that he recently had to undergo minor surgery in the USA.