St Lucia and the Teachers Group - Humana Alert

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Teachers Group in St Lucia

  The landholdings  

Mt Lezard Estate

Mt Lezard Estate Ltd (UK)

This banana plantation appears to be run by a UK onshore registered company, Mt Lezard Estate Ltd. This company is run by very high powered Teachers Group board of directors: at least three are considered members of the all-powerful 'TG Economy'.

Company details

  St Lucia and the TG  

Between 1983 and 1987, around £7 million is said to have been transferred out of Teachers Group general accounts and used to buy commercial landholdings in the Caribbean countries of St Lucia, St Vincent, Grand Cayman and Belize.

In St Lucia, the Teachers Group owns large plantations at Mount Lezard Estate, Park Estate and River Doree.

Commercial fruit plantations

  Who runs the St Lucia     plantations?  

Soren Hofdahl is the resident Teachers Group general manager. His address is given as Vieux Fort, St Lucia. Hofdahl is a director of the UK company Mt Lezard Estate Ltd, and was also in 1999 a director of Planet Aid Inc, the Teachers Group used cothes enterprise in the USA.

Eva Vestergaard (Belize) - company secretary, Mt Lezard Estate Ltd (2007), a director since 1993. A very hard core director of the 'TG Economy'. Police originally laid charges against her in 2003, but these charges were dropped.

Anne Hansen (director - St James St, London SW1) (2007) Also a senior member of the 'TG economy' and a trustee of several offshore funds. Heavily implicated in the financial affair of the acquisition of the Fazenda Jatoba ranch in Brazil - at the heart of the TG fraud trial.

Birgitte Krohn (director - Correntina, Brazil) (2007). Also active within the TG Economy and implicated in the Fazenda Jatoba affair. Currently involved with the TG property in Mexico.

Tone Kvaestad (director - London W1) (2007)

Knud Hansen director - (Monkey River Estate, Belize) (2007)

Previous directors:

Sten Byrner - director and company secretary (pre 1991-1992). Byrner is one of the five currently charged with fraud in Denmark, and is in hiding from Danish authorities.

Poul Joergensen (director, around 1991). Joergensen is one of the five currently charged with fraud in Denmark, and the only one likely to actually stand trial, as he did not leave the country.

Park Estate

No information

River Doree Holdings

River Doree Holdings Ltd

Where did the money come from for the Caribbean plantations?

According to credible reports, the landholdings were bought by the Teachers Group in the 1980s using a large surplus already built up in its common funds.

This fortune was amassed by clever concentration of the Teachers Group's income. Money given to the Teachers Group - for example by individual members or, at that time, the Danish government, was supposed to be spent on staff and projects.

But in fact 'teachers' and project leaders worked for nothing. The money was instead banked in a common fund. Two foundations, Faelleseje and Estate, were set up to handle this money, and used it to buy the landholdings .'Between 1983 and 1987 around £7 million was transferred from the general fund to the foundations to buy properties for the

 

Tvind schools, as well as plantations In St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Grand Cayman and Belize,' the Guardian reported in 1993.

The brains behind the idea - Henning Bjornlund

The scheme to spend the Teacher's Group's money on commercial landholdings is generally credited to Henning Bjornlund, alias 'Henry Henning', the Teachers Group so-called 'chief accountant' and 'financial mastermind' between about 1972 - 1989.

Bjornlund was a 1972 graduate of the Tvind school in Denmark and went on to direct the development of the Teachers Group's finances in close collaboration with Amdi Petersen and the 'TG Economy'.

In 1989 or 1990, Bjornlund and his wife Vibeke Jensen, left the Teachers

Group, apparently with a handsome pay-off, and emigrated to Australia.

in a sting operation conducted by the Danish tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet in 1995, Bjornlund and his Vibeke are said to have 'confessed' to arranging the land acquisitions with the Teachers Group's money.

"I was not supposed to waste Tvind's money. The plantations had to make a profit. They're pure business," Bjornlund reportedly told the reporter Kurt Simonsen, himself a Tvind graduate. How much money does the Teachers Group have? "'Billions!"

Bjornlund is now an academic at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, where his early career as financial adviser to the Teachers Group is unknown to students and fellow staff. In his online CV, Bjornlund strangely fails to mention his 15 years with the TG.

  The story of the Caribbean plantations 

 

Conditions on the plantations - the strike of 1986

1986: The Teachers Group bullies its way into St Lucia - Roy Lawaetz's story

The 1,137 acre Mt Lezard Estate on St Lucia was bought by the Teachers Group in 1986. Previously, it had been owned by the Lawaetz family, who according to former journalist Roy Lawaetz, did not want to sell. They were forced to do so because of a compulsory purchase order brought by the St Lucia government, on behalf of the Danish Teachers Group.

It is not known what pressure the TG put on St Lucia to release the land. Roy Lawaetz's father, Erik Lawaetz, then 75, was unable to resist the combined pressure of TG and the St Lucia prime minister Sir John Compton and was forced to sell the land 'at a bargain price'. After the sale the government entered into a complicated lease-back agreement which guaranteed the TG occupancy in the teeth of the family's opposition.

This is Roy Lawaetz's story.

 

2007: The River Doree story