Pleasurama development Ramsgate again

As followers of this blog will know I emailed all of the councillors last week and had some responses see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-thanet-district-councillors-have.html I was a bit disappointed how few councillors bothered to respond, even so I managed to gather quite a lot of useful information.

One of the new things to emerge was that there is a prospective buyer for the hotel, Wentworth Investments, however on investigation they appear to be a non-trading dormant company.

Another thing that is of concern is SFPs failure to obtain a performance bond from their bank, from what I can see looking at the correspondence the councillors were totally misinformed about the cost of the bond.

The councillors appear to be under the impression that the bond would cost the developer about half a million pounds and were this the case the developers argument that this money would be saved for the development is a good one.

However the reality is very different to obtain a £5,000,000 performance bond the developer would normally have to deposit £500,000 pounds with his bank or specialist insurance company, this would be returned on satisfactory completion of the development, the cost of the bond would be about £10,000.

It doesn’t take a lot of working out to see if the cost of insuring against the developer going bankrupt was really 10% of the amount insured the banks would stand to make a considerable profit if in the case of all insured developments in 9% of cases the developer went bankrupt, this is plainly absurd.

This brings us to the question, why would SFP tell the council that the cost of the bond was 50 times greater than it really is?

The only likely reason I can see that the developer can’t get a bond is that no bank or insurance company is willing to take the risk that they won’t go bankrupt before the development is completed.

So now we have SFP Venture Partners Limited an offshore company, SFP Ventures UK Limited a dormant company and Wentworth Investments Limited another dormant company.

None of them have websites, SFP in its different guises a developer that never appear to have developed anything and Wentworth Investments that want to buy the hotel from them but never appear to have run an hotel.