$3.4M land payment stopped

Only last week, a Saipan family stood to receive $3.45 million as compensation for the property where the Marianas High School sits. That family may now end up with nothing, after the Attorney General’s Office said the payment of the land compensation might be illegal.

Assistant attorney general Benjamin Sachs asked the Commonwealth Development Authority on Monday not to process a $3.45-million drawdown request made by the Marianas Public Lands Authority for the benefit of the Maliti Estate.

Administrated by Jesus C. Tudela, the Maliti Estate comprises the heirs of Angel Maliti, who owned the 6,900-square meter property that the Trust Territory government condemned for the purpose of constructing what is now Marianas High School.

On Nov. 9, 1978, the court awarded $3,682.30 to the Maliti family as compensation for the condemned land.

The government says it issued a check to pay a portion of the award. It is not known if the check was paid to the Maliti family. The heirs claim they never received any amount from the government.

Last September, the MPLA board of directors approved the payment of $3.45 million in land compensation to the Maliti heirs. The amount was based on an appraisal conducted in the early 1990s, when the value of Saipan real estate was very high.

The board said $3.45 million was a fair amount, given the length of time that the family has waited for compensation. The board also maintained that the government, not the Maliti family, was at fault as to why the payment took too long.

Pursuant to this decision, the MPLA made a requisition, requesting the $3.45 million drawdown from the Land Compensation Fund. The request has been approved by the Finance secretary, and now awaits processing at CDA.

But in a Nov. 8, 2004 letter to CDA’s attorney, assistant attorney general Sachs asked the authority to wait before paying out the requisition to allow Finance and MPLA to consider legal and other issues concerning the payment.

“Please note the huge discrepancy between the amount of the 1978 judgment [$3,682.30] and the requisition amount [$3,450,000]. With 9-percent judgment interest, even if compounded annually, on $3,682.30, the total amount would be about $34,610.52 rather than the amount that MPLA is now trying to pay,” Sachs noted.

Citing two reasons, the AGO also offered opinion that the Maliti Estate may no longer have a legal claim in the condemnation case.

First, Sachs said, the claim has long expired under the Commonwealth’s 20-year statute of limitations.

“Therefore, assuming for the sake of discussion that there had been no judgment in this case, if the claimants were to file a new legal action for compensation for the land that was taken, the action would fail, because it is barred by the 20-year statute of limitations, which expired before 1998, 20 years after the government took the Maliti land,” Sachs said.

He added that the 1978 judgment entered in the condemnation case is itself barred by the passage of time.

Sachs explained that under the law, after a judgment has been in effect for 20 years, the creditor can no longer enforce the judgment.

“Therefore, we believe that the heirs of Angel Maliti no longer have an enforceable legal claim against the Commonwealth. Payment of the Maliti claim would be the equivalent of a gift, a gratuity,” Sachs said. “Since Commonwealth funds may only be spent in the public interest, and it is at least questionable that the public interest would be served by payment of a claim that is not legally enforceable, serious questions arise about paying any sum on this claim, let alone almost 1,000 times the present value of the judgment.”

Sachs cited another statute saying that a judgment is presumed to have been paid after 20 years have passed.

“The law requires that we presume it has been paid. For the Maliti family now to enforce their claim for payment for the land in question, the burden would be on them to prove that the judgment was not paid.

“On the contrary, however, there is some evidence that the [Trust Territory] government did at least attempt to pay the judgment—checks were written, although we do not know what happened to the money. As far as we know, the Maliti family may have already been paid. This question should, at a minimum, be looked into before any money is paid on this claim at all,” Sachs said.