Tuesday 30 June 2009

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.

7 comments:

  1. Time to sit back and wait for the day you can say (or think) "Told you so" ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. We need the space used as an amusement park for the remaining summer!

    ReplyDelete
  3. See this image for what it should look like now!
    http://ramsgate-pleasurama.weebly.com/news.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Angry RamsgaetJuly 01, 2009 9:26 am

    Do they really think the people of Thanet are so stupid that they haven't smelt a rat about this development months ago - come on SFP Ventures or whatever you call yourselves either cough up the loot or sell up and GO AWAY!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Angry RamsgaetJuly 01, 2009 9:26 am

    Do they really think the people of Thanet are so stupid that they haven't smelt a rat about this development months ago - come on SFP Ventures or whatever you call yourselves either cough up the loot or sell up and GO AWAY!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oops! My finger slipped. My name should of course have read "Angry Ramsgate Resident who wants our seafront back"

    ReplyDelete
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.