LotuslandOnLoanVille
Well, it looks like the financial review of Vancouver's Olympic Village Development is going to be the real deal.
With auditors and an eyes-wide-open mandate and everything.
FABula had the story in the Globe yesterday.
Therein, I found the following passage particularly interesting:
"The city's legal team constructed a complex agreement to lease the land to Millennium during the construction period, then lease it back for the duration of the Olympics, then make a final sale to the company after the Games.
It is because of that arrangement that the city originally agreed to provide a loan guarantee of $193-million - the value of the land - for the $750-million construction loan that Millennium later obtained from U.S. hedge fund Fortress Investment Group......"
Why interesting?Well, because it means that the money we initially pumped into the thing WAS used to help back Millenium's deal with the leverage happy Hedgie Boys from back east.
And if those very same suddenly hard currency-challenged Hedgie Boys are now having serious troubles raising money and meeting payments, as was strongly suggested by the fact that they recently got into big, big trouble with the creditors behind their Whistler 'investment', I'll once again ask the question I've asked a whole bunch of times before.....
What the heckfire was the extra hundred million bucks we, the people of Lotusland, recently pledged to the Hedgie Boy-backed Millenium boondoggle project really for?
Hopefully the 'review' of the deal will give us an answer.
Leak-free, of course.
OK?
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Given recent developments, one can only wonder if the good Senator from daVinci, he who stood on the front steps of City Hall with Philly 'O a few weeks ago and told us to stop worrying and be happy, has made any attempts to unload one of his two (count 'em two!) boondoggle-based condos yet?
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