Hawaii is no stranger to billionaire landowners. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and even Oprah have famously bought up large tracts of land in the Islands. But there’s one foreign billionaire landowner that has been completely absent for more than a decade: the owners of Molokai Ranch.

The ranch’s landholdings encompass one-third of the entire island of Molokai. It’s owned by billionaire investment firm Guoco Group, based out of Hong Kong. Its collective portfolio is estimated to be worth $5.2 billion. Additionally, Guoco Group is part of the Hong Leong Group, a conglomerate in Malaysia, founded by billionaire businessmen.

Molokai Ranch is more than 55,000 acres of land — and it’s not just a ranch. It also consists of a high-end lodge, glamping resort, a restaurant, golf course and the island’s only movie theater. 

These facilities have been sitting abandoned like a ghost town, a deteriorating remnant of its past life.

Guoco Group acquired Molokai Ranch when it gained a controlling stake in Brierley Investments, a New Zealand company, in 2005. The Hawaiian monarchy originally owned the land, and then Honolulu businessmen purchased it for sugarcane production in 1897. Since then, a succession of owners have used the land for many purposes: a cattle ranch, a wildlife park, a pineapple plantation, and hotel and golf club.

In 2004, Molokai Ranch had plans to develop 200 luxury homes along the pristine shoreline of Laau Point. When those plans failed, largely due to community pushback, the company shut down operations in 2008, laying off more than 120 employees.

“They’re making the town of Maunaloa suffer,” Walter Ritte, Native Hawaiian activist and Molokai resident, told SFGATE. “They closed the hotel and put sand in the swimming pool. They closed the golf course, cut the coconut trees and used that to prevent access to the old golf courses. The response is really negative and then they decided, ‘OK, well we’re going to just sell this place and get out of here.’”

(SFGATE reached out to Guoco Group and its local entity Molokai Properties Limited could not be reached for comment.)

In 2017, the ranch was put up for sale with an asking price of $260 million. “The time has arrived to offer a new owner the freedom to realize the property’s potential to create an enduring legacy,” Sotheby’s International Realty described on its website.

Meanwhile, Ritte said rents and water rates are being raised for Maunaloa residents, and poor land management practices are leading the land to erode into the sea, which affects residents’ subsistence lifestyle. “The foreigners are not too much concerned about our subsistence way of life,” he said.

“Our goal is to try and shine the light on the landowners because they’re invisible people that nobody knows and it’s impacting our island of Molokai, which is the center of all the Islands,” Ritte said. “We’ve been fighting this war for 40 years now.”

Last month, more than 100 island residents marched on Molokai Ranch when access to the only road leading to Kawakiu Beach was blocked by a recently installed locked gate. For generations, Native Hawaiians have used the road for access to cultural and historical sites and to hunt and fish for subsistence living. These traditional rights are protected in Article 12, Section 7 of the Hawaii Constitution.

The community members cut the lock, then proceeded down the road to the beach.

“The march was there because they took away our hard-fought access rights for Hawaiians,” Ritte said.

Molokai Properties Limited released a statement saying misinformation is being spread and that the gate was locked for safety reasons because of a commercial hunting operation.

“The gate is in place to deter unauthorized hunting vehicles from accessing lands in potential conflict with ongoing, registered hunts. Allowing unregulated use of firearms, particularly while another hunt may be ongoing, would pose a safety risk,” the statement said. “There is an open mechanism where visits to cultural sites and community hunting can be requested and arranged in advance.”

The last time Molokai Ranch put up a gate was in 1975, under a different owner. Back then, Ritte led more than 200 residents on a hike across West Molokai on an old Hawaiian foot trail to demonstrate their right to access the land. Ritte said that movement is what led to the constitutional protections in the first place.

“We will be exercising our birthright as Hawaiians to walk on a Hawaiian trail,” Ritte said in a 1975 article of the Honolulu Advertiser. “We, the people of Hawaii, own the beaches and we are going to go to those beaches whenever we want. We are not going to bow down before Molokai Ranch and say, ‘Please give us a pass, so I can fish to feed my family.’”

The Molokai community has been wanting to buy back Molokai Ranch for a long time, but past proposals were unsuccessful.

Ritte said he would prefer to have better communications with Molokai Ranch’s owners in hopes of striking a deal, but said there’s absolutely none. “We’ve never had communications with them for the past 40 years,” he said. 

Last year, the nonprofit groups Molokai Heritage Trust and Sustainable Molokai held community meetings to help facilitate the conversation of buying Molokai Ranch. Those talks are still ongoing today, as they determine how best to structure a proper stewardship organization. The hope is that one day the community will be able to take back the lands and repair it for the next generations of Hawaiians.

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