Hey Ian!  Been awhile.

BTW, don't know if you had caught this Little Cayman news from
November 2004:

http://www.huntzinger.com/photo/2004/little_cayman/square_grouper-small.jpg

Maybe it can be heard on Marl Road...

Ouch!  I had forgotten about his stroke.   Years ago, I was a bit
resentful with the way that he turned out Winston on his ear at
BRBR...until I learned more about Winston and the way that he ran Brac
Aquatics (such as stiffing Dan Volker on a paycheck, etc).  In
hindsight, it was the proper business move to have made, and without
it, BRBR would have been even less viable than Divi.

Its currently stable, with a long, slow lingering death likely to
follow.

Divi Resorts appears to be utterly committed to minimizing their
financial obligations and liabilities, regardless of how much bad
press and ill will it generates, and regardless of how many business
opportunities they choose to turn away.  Its pretty obvious that
they're determined to make the case of a "clean" set of books with no
ambiguities (all trades in have been banned) so as to trty to make it
all a slam-dunk bankrupcy proceeding.    This will probably take them
~3 years, or however long the relevant laws require for document
retention.  Bottom line is that their books were obviously such an
utter mess, they've really had no clue on their financial picture for
a decade.

The good news is that Bldg#2 is finally under reconstruction (gosh,
only took them 4 years) with materials that were shipped in 2 years
ago.

Thus, we expect to actually be in our contracted unit this
year...first time since 2002.   Supposedly, they're then going to shut
down Bldg#1 and "fix" the deficiencies that were made in its 2006
reconstruction - the specifics are here that the changes they made
were clearly in violation of building code for hurricane protection.

Of course, the Caymanian government lacked the backbone to shut them
down, since we could have then nailed them to the tree for clear
breach of contract, but the more that we learn about Caymanian law,
how it gets locally applied, and local politics, the less we like it
and the more grateful we become for having passed on buying a couple
of houses that had been offered to us.  Overall, Cayman may be a nice
place to visit, but I'd disinclined from ever making an investment
there...one of the things that we've learned with the Divi Tiara
timeshares is that there's no consumer protection laws.

Nevertheless, we figure that the Divi Tiara "ride" has a few more
years in it before Divi effectively folds up shop.  We will persist in
being a thorn in their side, due to our 2/624th interest claims on
their assets, but also because they have caused us so much emotional
pain due to just how grossly incompetent their management has been to
have to watch.  For actual diving, we'll probably then shift back over
to LC a bit, although since we got a copy of "1000 places to see
before you die", there's a lot of other places in the world to sample
that are just as "easy" of an airline connection.

-hh