The pristine beaches, sprawling party palaces, and richly chronicled social scene—it’s every developer’s dream to re-create Mustique. Who wouldn’t want to lord over a place where billionaires and Hollywood types go to get away from the merely rich?
Andrea Pignataro, the Italian billionaire who owns and manages much of the neighboring island of Canouan, nearly achieved it. For a brief moment, Canouan was one of the most talked-about resorts in the Caribbean and a retreat that attracted George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Then it all started to fall apart.
In December, a court in Birmingham, England, heard a case concerning a real-estate spat on the island. It made no headlines, yet it was the first time that Pignataro—who now runs the London-based software firm ION Group—had reason to be nervous. The money on the table, a contested payment of around $700,000, is the spark that may lead to an explosion more than 4,000 miles away.
Located 14 miles southwest of Mustique and comprising just five square miles, Canouan is part of the cluster of islands known as the Grenadines. To the world’s wealthiest, it’s a household name, but it’s a relatively new development.
Its story begins in the 1990s, when Mustique’s authorities refused to allow Antonio Saladino, a wealthy Swiss-Italian banker, to build his dream home there. He bought a near-uninhabited island nearby, signing a 99-year lease for most of Canouan.
He wanted not only to clone Mustique’s template but to improve it with even more luxurious development. (He conveniently overlooked the fact that Mustique mastermind Colin Tennant went bankrupt while chasing a similar dream.) Saladino’s ambitions were best summed up with the braggish tagline that became synonymous with his island: “Where the billionaires go to escape the millionaires.”
He started constructing homes—a few dozen in total—while carving land into plots to sell to individual builders. He hoped to attract vacationers, too, by developing a sprawling hotel operation that included two-thirds of the island.
After opening in 1999, the hotel has lived many lives; it was managed by Rosewood and Raffles at various points. Things got interesting in 2003, when Donald Trump arrived.
He developed a theme park of sorts, opening a Trump Monte Carlo casino and a Trump International Golf Club, and peppering the beach with the D.J. Trump villas. It didn’t go so well. By 2015, the casino had gone bust and was transformed into a hurricane shelter, and the Welcome to Trump Island sign that greeted arrivals at the airport disappeared.
For a few years, the hotel was known as the Pink Sands Club, and it is now operating as the Mandarin Oriental Canouan, which has 26 suites and eight villas. (Rooms go for up to around $7,000 per night in the high season.) Canouan is also home to the first Caribbean outpost of a Soho Beach House members’ club and hotel, which opened on Grand Bay in 2021. There are also smaller lodgings at the newish marina on the southern tip of the island.
Though Saladino’s efforts floundered, he was right about one thing: Canouan’s natural beauty arguably eclipses Mustique’s. Turtles roam freely among its white-sand beaches and rolling green hills. (“Canouan” means “isle of turtles” in a local dialect.)
When Saladino began developing the island, in the late 90s, he lured some of the world’s wealthiest to buy homes there, such as hedge-fund manager Ian Wace and the De’Longhi family, who made a fortune in espresso machines.
Canouan’s runway, now the longest in the region, was expanded in 2008 to accommodate long-haul private jets. It can handle an Airbus A320, but commercial service is limited to sporadic puddle jumpers operated by the likes of a small airline called Grenadine Alliance. No wonder the island welcomes so few tourists—in 2023, there were less than 4,000 arrivals.
The problems on Canouan began when Saladino’s fortunes took a dive. Much like Tennant in Mustique, his ambitions outstripped his assets, and he was forced to bring in outside investors. The Irish billionaire Dermot Desmond, who owns and manages the Sandy Lane development in Barbados, bought a 50 percent stake in Canouan in 2010. Now his holdings make up most of the southern half of the island.
Later, Saladino would turn to a second source of funding to keep his dream for Canouan alive—a fellow Italian, Pignataro, the Bologna-born math whiz turned financier nicknamed “the Italian Bloomberg.” Now there are two fiefdoms: Pignataro’s, to the north, and Desmond’s, to the south. They are separated by a small village that houses mostly service workers.
Pignataro is at the center of the scandal. His strange attitude toward his fellow homeowners is what sparked the lawsuit, the first in what is likely to be a trend.
The British case against him was brought by Angel Buenano, a Venezuelan businessman and part-time Canouan resident. He had previously filed a flurry of salvos in Eastern Caribbean courts, alleging that Pignataro’s associates intimidated him and refused to allow his family to access a beach. (Pignataro did not respond to AIR MAIL’s multiple requests for comment sent to his spokesperson.)
In the British case, Buenano accused one of Pignataro’s shell companies of cheating him out of between $600,000 and $700,000 over the sale of a home he owned in Canouan Estate, a luxury development that forms part of Pignataro’s half of the island. The transaction, agreed to in 2015, assigned a value of $3.5 million to his home, with a clause stipulating that, should the company flip the property within three years for a greater sum, it would owe him 30 percent of the difference.
Sure enough, according to court documents, the home changed hands two years later in a complex transaction that moved it between different parts of Pignataro’s empire at a valuation of $6 million. Buenano wanted his money, and Pignataro refused to pay up.
Seven years later, they landed in a British court—a rarity for the Italian, who prefers to settle litigation rather than risk publicity.
The defense argument included a strange claim: “The transfer was not at market value.” It seems that Pignataro refutes the claim by suggesting he artificially inflated the value of Buenano’s former house for accounting conveniences. This implies that Canouan’s homes are not appreciating.
According to a source with knowledge of Canouan’s real-estate market, only three homes have been sold there in the past seven years, and all were transactions between existing owners. The rumor that the island may be a poor investment seems to have gotten around.
The government of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is just as concerned with its declining reputation as Buenano is. At a public hearing last summer, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves identified the problem on Canouan as “the person who took over.” “It’s a question of taking care of the infrastructure,” he tells Air Mail. “[Canouan] is out of sync with Mustique, where we saw a tremendous amount of [real estate] activity during the Covid period.”
The total G.D.P. of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is around $1.2 billion, primarily driven by tourism and agriculture. One source claimed that Canouan used to contribute between 8 and 9 percent of that—far ahead of Mustique—but it has now fallen behind. Gonsalves says that although the figure was never that high, Canouan was once “a significant contributor” to the economy, but that is no longer the case. Mustique, he says, generates between $40 and $50 million in economic activity each year.
As Gonsalves noted, the issue seems to be that Pignataro has allegedly failed to invest in the upkeep of roads, landscaping, and common areas that belong to the association of homeowners. “People are forced to spend $300,000 for maintenance, but the problem is it’s not even done well,” says someone who has frequented the island for decades. “Would you want to buy a property in a place where you get no maintenance and people that own houses are treated as subjects, not clients?”
In Caribbean court proceedings, Pignataro’s defense noted that those accusing him of neglecting this upkeep had willingly withdrawn from the community’s “Maintenance Agreement,” which provides such services, in 2020.
In the same lawsuit, Pignataro was accused of allegedly blocking outside staff from accessing owners’ homes, and banning the residents who withdrew from the “Maintenance Agreement” from the Soho House, Mandarin Oriental, and Canouan Estate and Resort facilities, which all sit on land he leases. The judge issued a temporary injunction against Pignataro.
It hasn’t always been so contentious. One homeowner described the reaction to Pignataro’s arrival as “dancing in the streets. It was a sort of relief that there was someone that had genuine desire to make this place into what we all thought it should be.”
Until recently, most owners agreed that avoiding publicity was paramount, given its tendency to further erode the value of multi-million-dollar homes. (Many whom Air Mail approached did not respond to requests for comment.)
But now some are speaking out. “I’d like to take a page in a magazine and advertise my house with the following statement: ‘House for sale in Canouan. Best offer accepted,’” says one.
“One of the problems is that the owners are either involved in some sort of litigation or they are afraid and don’t want to damage the image of the island even further,” adds another source.
Canouan’s breaking point may have been reached after Hurricane Beryl, which passed over the island on July 1, 2024. For the first time in decades, it faced a direct hit from a Category 4 storm. The United Nations has estimated that 90 percent of its homes were damaged or destroyed.
One homeowner in Pignataro’s Canouan Estate pledged $15 million for relief and rebuilding efforts. Gonsalves says that Wace also donated $25 million.
Pignataro’s response was allegedly not quite as generous. Batu Erem, the C.E.O. of Pignataro’s Canouan Group, was sent down to the local village with, according to a source, “one bag of pasta, a leftover box of Italian rice, and a bag of beans. I don’t know if it was done for spite.” (In response to a detailed list of questions AIR MAIL sent to Erem, a spokesperson for the Canouan Group wrote that “in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, the Canouan Group mobilized immediately to support the island’s recovery, collaborating with partners to restore essential services and infrastructure in record time” and that it provided financial support for local employees. The group also says they have established a fund supported by 10 percent of hotel revenues to “enhance long-term sustainability and disaster preparedness.”)
Erem clashed noisily with Gonsalves on the steps of the police station three days after the storm. Although Erem sent a letter the following day with cooler rhetoric, it was too late. The government, already exasperated by the drop-off in income from Canouan’s real-estate market, issued an exclusion order for Erem—in other words, a deportation—and he was escorted from the country. (He reportedly remains in his role and is now working remotely from Turks and Caicos.)
In the past eight months, the island has started to recover. The Mandarin Oriental and Soho House hotels have reopened, and many homes are being rebuilt. “There is a real sense of optimism in the village, and in the south, a buoyancy,” says Gonsalves. “I do not detect that same buoyancy in the north.”
Meanwhile, a verdict was handed down in the British court case, awarding $712,723.84 to Buenano. For a billionaire like Pignataro, it’s not ruinous, but it’s likely to be the first battle in a long war.
“He treats [Canouan] as his private fiefdom, and he doesn’t understand he bought a business,” says a source. “You would need to come from the moon to want to buy something there right now.”
Mark Ellwood is a columnist for Bloomberg Pursuits, the creator and a co-host of Bloomberg’s Travel Genius podcast, and the author of Bargain Fever: How to Shop in a Discounted World