Latest news with #expropriation
CTV News
31-07-2025
- General
- CTV News
City of Kenora aiming to expropriate historic hotel
A historic hotel in Kenora is expected to be expropriated due to neglect, but not everyone in the community is on board. CTV's Danton Unger explains.
CTV News
31-07-2025
- General
- CTV News
Kenora looking to expropriate historic hotel
A historic hotel in Kenora is expected to be expropriated due to neglect, but not everyone in the community is on board. CTV's Danton Unger explains.
Reuters
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Chile's government to expropriate land tied to Pinochet-era torture
VILLA BAVIERA, July 23 (Reuters) - Chile plans to expropriate a settlement founded by a German cult leader where torture took place during former dictator Augusto Pinochet's military regime as the government takes another step to shine a light on a dark period of the past. The enclave, originally called Colonia Dignidad and renamed Villa Baviera, was founded in 1961 by Paul Schafer, a former Nazi medic turned evangelical preacher who kept the isolated community under tight control and was later jailed for sexually abusing children. During Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, Colonia Dignidad also bore witness to another kind of abuse: the torture of political prisoners by military forces in a secret prison at the site. Schafer collaborated with Pinochet's secret police and in exchange was shielded for years from prosecution for his own crimes. The dictatorship viewed the secretive, fortified and remote community as an ideal site to detain and torture dissidents away from public view. The government now wants to turn the 290-acre (117-hectare) community into a memorial, Justice Minister Jaime Gajardo said at an event this month. The aim is to make it "a place that allows all Chileans to enter freely to learn about what happened there," Gajardo said. "Nothing justifies violating human rights as they were violated during the military dictatorship." Schafer died in prison in 2010. Several hundred families once lived at the settlement about 350 kilometers (217 mi) south of Santiago. Today the population numbers closer to 100, many of whom are descendants of the original German settlers. Businesses at Villa Baviera, or Bavarian Village, have tried in recent years to attract visitors to the area's picturesque green fields and views of snow-capped mountains. In the expropriation, property owners will be compensated under terms still to be determined by experts, Gajardo said. The government aims to complete the expropriation before President Gabriel Boric leaves office in March. The justice minister said the community consists of about 90 land parcels but did not specify the number of businesses or residents. Dozens of physically and mentally traumatized members of Colonia Dignidad eventually relocated to Germany, and the site's history drew international attention in the 2015 film "Colonia." Plans for the expropriation underscore the challenges for governments in coming to terms with complicated histories in places that have overlapping layers of rights abuses. Chile's National Institute of Human Rights in a recent report, opens new tab said those who were tortured by Pinochet's forces as well as the people who suffered under Schaefer's control were equally victims of Colonia Dignidad. Jose Patricio Schmidt, who grew up in Colonia Dignidad and still lives there, said residents had existed in a bubble, unaware of the dictatorship's abuses. "Schaefer would gather us together to read the Bible in a place about a kilometer from where people were tortured, and we knew nothing," he said in an interview at a memorial site in the community that pays tribute to the torture victims. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and tortured throughout Chile during Pinochet's rule, and 1,469 people were victims of forced disappearance. Some have criticized the government's move to take away property from current Villa Baviera community members, especially those who were themselves victims of abuse. Juergen Szurgeleis in an interview said he tried as a boy to escape forced labor and abuse at Colonia Dignidad. "Is it my fault for being born here?" he said. "And now they want to take away my land and leave me in the street?" Yet a former political prisoner at Colonia Dignidad, Luis Jaque, said he struggles to see how the community, which includes a German restaurant and a hotel catering to tourists, can carry on without recognizing the horrors of the past. "It's not reconcilable, at least not for me," he said.
Irish Times
21-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Berlin presents proposals to seize corporate property holdings
Two decades after a cash-strapped Berlin government sold off huge chunks of its social housing stock, the city has presented draft legislation to expropriate corporate landlords . The move is a delayed response to a successful citywide referendum in 2021 , when almost 58 per cent of Berliners backed a grassroots proposal to force landlords with more than 3,000 flats, to sell their holdings to the city. The main focus of the vote was Deutsche Wohnen, a listed company with 110,000 flats in the city, though other companies would also be affected. Back in 2021, Berlin's then city-state government campaigned against a proposal it said would cost the taxpayer billions without creating much-needed new housing. READ MORE After the successful vote, city politicians set up a commission to explore the legal concerns. In its final report, the commission said there were none: such an expropriation, while novel, is most likely covered by Article 15 of the Basic Law, postwar Germany's constitution. This article, never before used, states that 'land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of socialisation, be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation'. Such a drastic step could only be justified, the expert commission said, in a city with a housing crisis of tight supply and spiralling rents – a description which fits the German capital. Average rents are now rising by 15 per cent year-on-year and running at around €15 per square metre, meaning a 100sq m (1076sq ft) apartment costs €1,500 for rent alone, without running costs. Property agents say Berlin's real rental prices in many popular areas start at one third above the average. [ As bad as Dublin? In Berlin's broken rental market, 200 people apply for one apartment Opens in new window ] Almost 58 per cent of Berliners backed a grassroots proposal in 2021 to force landlords with more than 3,000 flats, to sell their holdings to the city. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/ AFP via Getty Images Some four years after the referendum, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), now junior coalition partner in Berlin's city-state government, has presented a draft bill which proposes taking under state control 'elementary areas of public services'. This need not stop at property: in recent years Berlin has bought the water provider and other utilities privatised 20 years ago in the same budgetary crisis that prompted the social housing sell-off. While the SPD see their draft proposal as responding to the referendum, allowing property owners sell up or accept public representatives at board level, the proposal has infuriated their centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) coalition partners. One senior CDU official told Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper the SPD had 'lost the plot completely'. Of particular concern to the business-friendly CDU is a clause suggesting housing and other public goods can and should be bought back at 'below-market rates'. The SPD argues that lower prices are legally justifiable 'given the structural change in the property system in favour of public use'. In response, the CDU Berlin's general secretary Ottilie Klein summoned up the memory of Berlin's pre-war communist-fascist street battles and postwar property seizures in socialist East Berlin, warning: 'If there is one thing Berlin doesn't need, then it's expropriations and class warfare.' Property agents say Berlin's real rental prices in many popular areas start at one third above the average. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/ AFP via Getty Images The draft proposal will now go for consultations with a view to a final agreement early in 2026, with legal challenges likely as soon as any bill becomes law. On another front in the cost of living crisis. Berlin's state government has confirmed it is 'discussing and examining extensively' new regulations to outlaw the long-term rental of furnished apartments. Such dwellings are excluded from regular rental controls, which stipulate that a new rent may not diverge more than 10 per cent above average local rents. 'Loopholes in tenancy law are being exploited for fixed-term and furnished rentals,' said a government spokesman, explaining the move 'and exorbitant sums are being demanded'.
Bloomberg
02-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
South African Treasury Warns Against Changing SARB Ownership
Changing the ownership structure of the South African Reserve Bank could generate fears among investors about expropriation and create more uncertainty about property rights, according to the National Treasury. While full ownership of the central bank by the state may be desirable, 'it will potentially have huge cost implications and require significant trade-offs, including a negative impact on investment and on economic growth,' Chris Axelson, the Treasury's deputy director-general for tax and the financial sector, told lawmakers in Cape Town on Wednesday.
