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London Entertainment Resort: All Discussion

pluk said:
If this particular coffin needed any more nails in, this one could well be the final one...

www.kentonline.co.uk

Company behind £3.5bn ‘Dartford Disneyland’ faces High Court showdown

The future of a firm aiming to deliver a controversial theme park project in Kent hangs in the balance after being taken to court by Paramount.
www.kentonline.co.uk www.kentonline.co.uk

Effectively insolvent not making good on CVA, and being taken to court by Paramount.
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“Despite the setback, LRCH bosses stated the dream was not dead and revealed investors acting on behalf of it had expressed an interest in taking over the land”

Ill Be Back Jim Carrey GIF
 
Bowser said:
“Despite the setback, LRCH bosses stated the dream was not dead and revealed investors acting on behalf of it had expressed an interest in taking over the land”

Ill Be Back Jim Carrey GIF
Click to expand...
But... they're insolvent and getting sued left, right and centre? Surely these "investors" will want paying back, yet from where I'm standing, it's abundantly clear that LRCH lacks any ability to do so?

As much of a believer in this as I once was 5 years ago or so, I think it is well and truly dead and buried now and has been for quite a while. I think it would do all parties involved a world of good to just step away and sack it off as a bad job now.
 
Im confused, I thought LRCH only ever had an option to purchase land (which expired), and never actually owned any land?

Did they have an initial lease or something?
 
WillPS said:
Im confused, I thought LRCH only ever had an option to purchase land (which expired), and never actually owned any land?

Did they have an initial lease or something?
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I think you're correct, if I'm remembering rightly. LRCH never purchased any of the land, and merely had an "agreement" in place to secure the land for later purchase, which expired in December 2022.
 
Poisson said:
Taking over the land, building a massive housing estate, sell houses at big profits. That's how.
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Sure, that's how the present and future land owners would make money.

What does LRCH have to do with that is my question? They would be neither party, and they have no greater claim to the land than any other development given their purchase options have all expired.

The only possible value they could add would be if some nutty group wanted to put a theme park there and reheat their plans...
 
I’m not sure whether this is the news already talked about, but a High Court judge has said that the company “has not traded in a while and is unlikely to ever trade again”, and put the wheels in motion to make them insolvent, thus finally putting an end to this sorry saga: https://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/202412/10639/

I honestly think it’s good riddance at this point. As much as the project briefly seemed to muster up some mild momentum again 5 years ago or so, there’s been no conceivable way that this park could happen for a fair while now, and as much as we might laugh about it, this whole saga has been awful for the local business owners and such whose livelihoods have been upended by the long-standing uncertainty over the land they own.
 
That’s why I question this project to the Universal project.
As all I remember about this project is just lots of drawings of rides and buildings and nothing else on the other hand with the universal project it just lists the basic things needed to get a project started.
It’s all the companies who did the drawings for them I feel sorry for as they now with not get a penny or the bear minimum off the government.
 
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.
 
Tom said:
Who owns the land? I guess that is/was the most important thing.
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Whoever it is, it’s not LRCH, which is the key bottleneck when it comes to land ownership. Even if “investors” do own it, they’ll want repaying eventually and based on the insolvency and the CVA not being met, LRCH lacks any ability to do so.

They have a lot of debts and little to no leverage with which to pay them off. If they owned all the land, they could at least sell it, but because they don’t, they have no means of paying off their debts whatsoever.
 
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