From having read back through some of the more recent news articles, the one where KentOnline interviewed Dr Abdulla al-Humaidi, the key backer of the project, had an interesting revelation regarding the whole plan for the project which could explain why it struggled to get off the ground.
According to that article, they had only secured investment to get them through the DCO planning application process, and had hopes of securing the much larger investment to actually build from elsewhere once they’d obtained planning permission.
Of course, they didn’t obtain planning permission and the money required for them to do so would have been prohibitive without further investment, so this was the key downfall of the whole plan, but even still, I think it may have struggled to attract further investment had it gained planning permission. As good as the base idea was on the face of it, I think some of the finer details were perhaps a tad unmoored from reality, in hindsight. I seem to remember the annual visitor figure target being something obscene like 15 million (more than DLP!), and I also seem to remember one of the planning documents talking about some 500ft tall arch theming structure as a mere footnote when in reality, this alone would cost hundreds of millions to build and be a feat of engineering taking multiple years to conceive. I do think that the £3.5bn or whatever may have been a very low estimate for what they were suggesting, particularly given that they ploughed £100m in without even getting anything off the ground.
I also think to myself; if it was a well planned idea, wouldn’t someone have committed to invest in it from cradle to grave rather than simply investing in getting it through the planning stages? If it had had a more committed investor with more financial weight, I dare say it may also have had a bit more momentum to be a successful project to begin with, which may not have had it end up in this scenario.
Unlike some, I don’t believe this was a money laundering scheme. I think it was a legitimate project, but in hindsight, it was a very poorly conceived one that perhaps had a degree of naivety regarding the UK planning system and how expensive such a project would actually be to bring to life.
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