The Tribune

LAST Friday, Deputy Provost Marshal Tommy Sands accompanied by a team of police officers seized the Simms Point/Nygard Cay premises of Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard, ending a nearly two-day standoff that some called unprecedented and shocking. Those who were appalled that Nygard’s staff managed to defy the third highest-ranking security officer of the land for the better part of two days, refusing him entry despite an order from the highest court in The Bahamas, should not have been surprised.

Mr Nygard has been ignoring orders from officials for decades. The final attempt at defiance to thwart the property from being seized to pay the legal fees and costs of Save The Bays was simply the latest scenario in a saga so outrageous in parts that if you tried to write a movie script and say it was based on a true story, you would have a hard sell in Hollywood, trying to convince producers that such goings-on exist outside Tinseltown. This is a book that has been writing itself for years with dramatic suspense. It is a story populated with characters some of whom seem better suited to the back streets of Chicago mob territory. It is ripe with tales of drug, sex, rock ’n roll, an ongoing battle with neighbours in an otherwise quiet pocket of paradise and near fisticuffs with government officials and environmentalists over illegal reclamation of Crown Land, construction of structures, groynes and gabions that altered the coastline, destroyed sea beds, impacted marine life, and at times offended just about everyone except the creator of this “resort” at the outer extremities of Lyford Cay. It is the tale of a misplaced vision by a man who is now being displaced from the very place the story began, the unwinding of a debacle destined to end with a thud.

One day, there probably will be a movie, or a riveting documentary, about the life and times of Peter Nygard, a once-dynamic figure in the fashion world, a man who wanted to create an environment on the shores of The Bahamas as big and outsized as his ego. He achieved his dream. There was giant statuary and even larger parties. As the “resort” off the end of residential Lyford Cay grew, so did the land.

Illegal dredging doubled its size from about three acres when Mr Nygard purchased it in 1984 to more than six acres. What he did not pay in property tax may have helped grease the political wheel for the party he thought would be a better friend, less concerned with the environment and the damage being done to the sea bed, less interested in how the illegal dredging and reclamation was changing the shoreline, less particular about the impact on marine resources, bird life that depended on the fish, the nearby dive operators who depended on the coral reefs.

He took personal and public pride in helping to return the PLP to power. He was so ecstatic about the PLP’s sweeping win in 2012 that shortly after the May election he marched through the inner city flanked by flunkies crying “Take back The Bahamas”.

The move was met with scepticism at every level. A foreigner wanting to take back whose Bahamas? What many do not realise, though, is the particular scepticism of the party’s leader, Perry Christie, who on the exterior seemed to embrace the man who helped his party, but internally wanted to keep a safe distance. Yes, he toured the property with a few other Cabinet ministers, but he also kept Nygard waiting when he showed up unannounced in the PM’s office wanting a meeting.

Before he died, Dr Arthur Porter detailed a request for a meeting by Mr Nygard who was visibly shaken by the fact that the PM wanted to meet him in the lower level of a Cable Beach hotel. Dr Porter’s recollection of the post-election meeting is in the story of his life, The Man Behind the Bow Tie.

While others partied hardy, Christie was cautious around Nygard though his term in office did provide some leniency and breathing room with less determination for enforcement while meantime, Mr Nygard was finding himself in deeper waters as a result of a non-governmental effort to live up to the rule of law.

There is a library of letters from various government departments, permanent secretaries, all with copies to Cabinet ministers, generally one-way correspondence advising Mr Nygard of the specific violations of Sections 61 and 369 of the Planning and Subdivision Act, of Section 4 of the Building Regulations Act, of Section 8 of the Coastline Protection Act.

He was ordered repeatedly to restore the coastline to the shape it had when he purchased the land. He was told of the “devastated sea beds” and a University of Miami marine report said damage from the dredging and debris stretched up to 84,000 metres.

But Mr Nygard answered most of the communication with a lack of interest though at times one attorney or another would reply or argue publicly promoting the man they declared had done so much for The Bahamas, supporting sports and a political party.

They say one man can make a difference. Mr Nygard did – he made a difference to his neighbours, to the environment, perhaps even to who governed the country for a time. In the end, he could not make a difference to the rule of law that caught up with him for contempt of court among other offences. In the end, the story ends with the final chapter it was destined to have from the moment it began.