‘Fraud and deceit’: locals decry Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged attempt to expand Hawaii estate
- Family members accuse billionaire of funding relative’s effort to buy land in case they say ‘violates fairly basic notions of justice’
- Rival relative’s bid for four pieces of land has roughly doubled in two months since auction
At a March auction, a group of Hawaiian relatives was able to block a distant cousin from buying one of four small parcels of land for sale on the island of Kauai. The outcome was shocking because the distant cousin, retired professor Carlos Andrade, had the backing of one of the richest men in the world: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose 283-hectare (700-acre) estate surrounds the disputed land.
But on Tuesday, the rules of the universe reasserted themselves. At a court hearing to finalise the outcome of the auction, Andrade was able to reopen the bidding and win the title to all four pieces of land for US$2,145,000.
“The family is devastated,” said Wayne Rapozo, leader of the group trying to outbid their billionaire-backed cousin. He described the bidding process as “a front for fraud and deceit against the Rapozo family” and said the case “violates fairly basic notions of justice in Hawaii and the United States”.
The outcome more than doubles the amount that Andrade appeared able to pay in March, when he bid US$1,060,000 for three of the parcels and failed to outbid Rapozo’s offer of US$700,000 for the fourth. Details of Tuesday’s bidding were reported in The Garden Island newspaper.
The dispute between Andrade, Rapozo and Zuckerberg has its roots in Hawaii’s complicated history of land ownership. The four parcels, known as kuleana, were bought by Portuguese immigrant Manuel Rapozo in 1882 and passed on to his seven children when he died intestate in 1928.
By the time Zuckerberg bought the surrounding acres in 2014, the title to the four parcels was divided between hundreds of descendants. Among them was Andrade, who claims to be the only family member to have ever lived on or cared for the land – a claim other family members dispute.
Zuckerberg filed a series of lawsuits in 2016 to try to find all the claimants and buy out their shares, ensuring his privacy. Following intense local and international backlash, which were viewed by many Hawaiians as consistent with a long history of colonialism and dispossession, Zuckerberg dropped the lawsuits but said he would support Andrade’s efforts to gain control of the four Rapozo-family parcels.
Those efforts ended with the public auction and Tuesday’s hearing. Litigation will continue, however, as Rapozo and another of the family “holdouts” have filed a separate claim saying Andrade’s alleged cooperation with Zuckerberg was improper.