LOVELL — A sheriff’s sale of a one-bedroom cabin named Early Bird at the private Severance Lodge Club has been canceled.

The Center Lovell property was seized by the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office under court order in April for nonpayment of association dues.

Chief Deputy Hart Daley was scheduled to auction the waterfront property at a public sale Wednesday, but the Venezuelan tycoon who owns the waterfront property has paid off the debt he owed the club and will retain ownership of his cabin.

In April, the Sheriff’s Office seized Richard Boulton’s property under a writ of execution issued by the Oxford County Superior Court. He owed the Severance Lodge Club — a luxury gated community on Kezar Lake — more than $18,500 in association dues and attorney’s fees.

Boulton, who is from Caracas, Venezuela, lists a multimillion-dollar Park Avenue co-op address near the south side of Central Park in New York City with the Oxford County Registry of Deeds. He has owned the Lovell property since 1998, when his mother, Anna Marie Boulton, deeded the land and cabin to him.

In the years since, Boulton has routinely failed to pay association dues and property taxes assessed by the town of Lovell, catching up with the debt only when pressed.

In addition to dues owed to the association, which are used by the club for regular maintenance and to fund amenities, he owes Lovell $18,165 in unpaid taxes since 2010. The annual overdue taxes range from a low of $3,080 in 2010 to a high of $4,080 in 2011. In 2014, the unpaid taxes totaled $3,450.

On Monday, the debt to the association had been paid but the debt to the town was still outstanding.

The town values Boulton’s three-room cabin, with a small bath, at $73,400, according to municipal records. The property it is on is assessed at $272,000 and is on the edge of Kezar Lake, which National Geographic once named one of three most beautiful lakes in the world. The front of the cabin juts slightly over the water.

According to court records, the property was on the market for $499,000 several years ago, but properties sold at auction can move for less than their value.

The sheriff’s liquidation sale was prompted by Severance Lodge Club seeking payment of Boulton’s debt, and is a little-used power of a sheriff to seize and liquidate property for repayment of debt. In this case, the liquidation sale was intended to pay back the association’s debt, and any proceeds over that would have been returned to Boulton.

Last month, Oxford County Sheriff Wayne Gallant told the Sun Journal the auction would have been the first he’d seen in almost a decade.

The land and cabin were to be auctioned as a “buyer beware” property, according to Daley, which means had it been sold, Boulton would have retained the right to reclaim the property for a year. After that, the winning bidder would have had to pay the overdue taxes to the town in order to get a clear title to the property.

Severance Lodge Club, which is off Route 5, dates back to the 1800s when it was a popular hunting and fishing destination and has since evolved into a private community of vacation homes on 60 forested acres.

Boulton’s property is one of the smallest there, its size and $345,400 value dwarfed by much larger homes valued at close to $1 million.

Unlike some of the other homes that sit high on a ridge with expansive views of the lake, Boulton’s property sits low. It doesn’t have the ornate decking outfitted on most of the other homes, and the interior is cluttered and in need of cleaning.

Boulton is one of Venezuela’s richest industrialists, whose family owned the now defunct airline company Avensa. In 2002, the same year Avensa went into bankruptcy, Boulton was ransomed for $460,000 after being held hostage by paramilitary groups for two years, according to Associated Press and British Broadcasting Company reports.

A group with ties to the country’s military and Columbia’s police force abducted Boulton, a commercial pilot and airline executive at the time, on his own plane.

According to Manhattan realty records, Boulton’s Park Avenue co-op is on the market. Asking price is $3.9 million.

jmeyer@sunjournal.com

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