Bill Gates arrives for a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee in Washington, DC in June 10. It hasn’t been a great year for the billionaire who now is mentioned in a lawsuit tied to a Caribbean resort.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2026 Bloomberg Finance LP<\/p>\n
The homeowners association of Four Seasons Resorts Nevis filed a lawsuit against Nevis Peak Holdings on Tuesday, August 11 in Delaware Chancery Court. Nevis Peak owns the luxury resort and surrounding property, which sits at the base of a volcanic mountain in Pinney\u2019s Beach, a roughly three-mile stretch of beach on the Caribbean island\u2014just north of Charlestown, Alexander Hamilton\u2019s birthplace. <\/p>\n
Nevis Peak is owned by Cascade, the family office of Bill Gates<\/a>, which bought the resort a decade ago. As of January 2022, Cascade also owns 71.25% of the Four Seasons, according to the suit. While Four Seasons manages the property, it wasn\u2019t named as a defendant in the suit. He\u2019s owned the Four Seasons with Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud of Saudi Arabia<\/a>, whose Kingdom Holding has a 23.75% stake, since 2007.<\/p>\n According to the suit, each homeowner paid $100,000 to get in the door at Four Seasons Resort Nevis, the luxury Caribbean island resort long reported as a quiet retreat for such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Justin Trudeau. They then pay upwards of $13,000 a year to keep using the place, plus a management fee of 25% on any bills for work the resort does for them and another 15% for major construction. <\/p>\n In return, the members allege they are living in a deteriorating resort where golf carts are in disrepair, pools have missing tiles, fitness center equipment is either outdated or non-functioning, and trash is strewn along the golf course and on the land around the resort.<\/p>\n The main eyesore is the golf pro shop and fitness center that were destroyed in an October 2022 fire, the complaint says. Nearly four years after the fire, homeowners say nothing has been rebuilt and that there\u2019s now just a fence around the rubble. When the association asked who would pay to put it back up, it says it was told Nevis Peak carries no fire insurance on the property, meaning that every dollar of the rebuild has to come out of the owner’s pocket.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the association, representing 66 owners of 89 villas on the 350-acre property, claim they have paid more than $20 million in management and club fees since 2013 for repairs that were never done. The association wants a judge to order Nevis Peak to step up. Failing that, it is seeking damages for what it says is more than $100 million in lost value. <\/p>\n The claims don\u2019t stop there: the suit also details how the transformers\u2013which turn grid power into usable electricity for the villas\u2013were bought secondhand, and that some are older than the resort, which opened in 1991. Taps run dry during the island’s dry season because the resort’s water system hasn’t been kept up, the complaint adds. <\/p>\n The resort may have problems but the view of Nevis Peak from the Four Seasons Resort is still spectacular.<\/p>\n getty<\/p>\n The association says it has spent $1.4 million of its own money in four years covering electrical and infrastructure repairs it argues were the responsibility of the owners, arguing that Nevis Peak \u201cutterly failed to meet its obligations\u2026 to the detriment of the Homeowners\u2019 use and enjoyment of the Resort and the value of their properties for sale and rental.\u201d Four Seasons ran the numbers itself and concluded the resort needs more than $65 million of work with over $20 million of that needed to replace what burned down and to redo the spa, per the complaint. <\/p>\n A spokesperson for Cascade Asset Management says it plans to fight these allegations, telling Forbes in a statement that it intends to \u201cvigorously defend itself against the claims, which it believes are entirely without merit.\u201d Nevis Peak and the homeowners association did not immediately respond to Forbes\u2019 request for comment. <\/p>\n This is not the first time the resort\u2019s homeowners have sued. After Hurricane Omar wrecked the resort in 2008 and the previous owner SK Nevis Resort failed to rebuild it, the homeowners sued in the same Delaware court. That case was settled in 2013, and the settlement came with a promise that the owner would sit down with the homeowners\u2019 board twice a year and open the books to show how the resort was being run.<\/p>\n That promise, they now say, has been broken. Even after the Gates-backed entity took over, the semiannual meetings and the financial picture have not materialized, nor has the five-year spending plan promised at a 2022 meeting, according to the complaint. <\/p>\n Ironically, the Gates group spent lavishly upon purchasing the resort. After buying the resort in 2016, Cascade hired designer Todd-Avery Lenahan to reimagine the exterior, lobby and 196 rooms with sea-foam wall coverings referencing 19th-century English botanicals, monkey-themed upholstery and stained-glass-inspired carpet. In 2018, Lenahan told The Hollywood Reporter that the multimillion dollar renovation was probably equal to or greater than what it cost to build the resort in the first place. <\/p>\n This is probably one of the last things Gates and his family need these days. Bill Gates has spent the past year answering for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including a June testimony to the House Oversight Committee, while Bloomberg reported<\/a> this week that daughter Phoebe Gates and her co-founder knew of and deliberately pushed features that falsely claimed credit for sales.<\/p>\n Forbes estimates Gates has a $108 billion net worth with more than $15 billion in cash\u2014dwarfing the $100 million in damages the association is claiming.<\/p>\n More from ForbesForbesTwo Divorces, Ten Children And A $2 Billion Fortune: Meet The Utah Couple Behind An E-Commerce EmpireBy Alicia Park<\/a>ForbesAboard The $250 Million Superyacht \u2018Amadea\u2019 With The World\u2019s Youngest Real Estate BillionaireBy Giacomo Tognini<\/a>ForbesYoung Americans Don\u2019t Trust Billionaire AI Leaders, New Poll FindsBy Zachary Folk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Gates arrives for a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee in Washington, DC in June 10.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[73],"tags":[269297,3189,79,6115,253942,18,161120,19,17,269299,269295,269298,269296],"class_list":["post-637283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-al-waleed-bin-talal","tag-bill-gates","tag-business","tag-caribbean","tag-cascade","tag-eire","tag-four-seasons","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nevis","tag-nevis-peak","tag-prince-alwaleed","tag-sk-nevis-resort"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117095270566991724","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}