1/33 #Brexit Lorry parks fiasco part 2 To recap: So Stone Hill Park, which failed to reopen Manston airport as promised is now operating the site as a lorry park... despite having sold it to the current owners Riveroak Strategic Partnership who will now also be unable to reopen
2/33 Manston.
3/33 The material below is largely adapted from the now defunct Thanet Eye blog and a wiki entry and confirmed by my own research
4/33 The people behind Manston are worth a closer look. Cartner and Musgrave's companies were in debt to the Bank of Scotland. Indeed Wynyard Park Limited has had a total of 23 charges registered against it since its incorporation.
5/33 The company was established as a three way partnership between J C Musgrave Ltd, Helios Partnerships Ltd and Iain Wotherspoon’s Kilmartin Property Group Ltd in 2005. It aimed to create A BILLION pound woodland development heralded as the “envy of the North-East which would
6/33 create more than 12,000 jobs." according to the North Eastern Echo.
7/33 In 2006 another firm, Strategic Sites Limited was established 2006 as a subsidiary of Wynyard Park Ltd. The directors included Paul Barber, a surveyor who trained at Kent County Council before becoming a founding director of government regeneration company English
8/33 Partnerships, and then chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland/Government joint venture Priority Sites.
9/33 Mr Barber subsequently became Managing Director of Wynyard Park in 2011, of Discovery Park in Kent in 2012, and in June 2014, chair of the Thanet Regeneration Board.
10/33 Wynyard Park Ltd received substantial backing from Bank of Scotland which issued a 36M GBP overdraft to the firm despite its losses of overover a million pounds in its first twenty one months of operation-
11/33 However in 2008 when the banking sector collapsed the Bank of Scotland, now part of Lloyds Bank went bust and as a result Kilmartin Property Group, in which the bank had a 50% stake went bankrupt in 2010. The company, had reported debts of £500 million and only £300 million
12/33 of assets, leaving taxpayer funded Lloyds facing a £200 million loss.
13/33 On 27th January 2010, just a a couple of weeks after the Kilmartin collapse, the auditors sign off the Wynyard Park Ltd accounts for the year to December 2008, but insert a crucial caveat: The company posted a net loss for the year of £2.46 million and had net assets of
14/33 only £64,138. The balance sheet shows over £52 million of liabilties becominmg due within one year.
15/33 The figures the auditor says “cast significant doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern”.
16/33 Despite the auditors warnings and joint venture partner Kilmartin Property Group having being forced into receivership, Wynyard Park Chief executive Chris Musgrave was as optimistic as ever, apparently telling the media that the site could create 12,000 jobs.
17/33 On 20 October 2014 he threatened the Thanet Eye blog with legal action for suggesting that Wynyard Park Limited was in trouble, althoug the blog had cited Companies House documents. According to Musgrave" the publicly available records failed to reveal that he had paid off
18/33 Wynyard Park's debts in October 2013 after selling some assets and investing further money in the scheme."
19/33 However the accounts for March 2016 still showed bank debts, and the company appears to be winding down- as of 2017 the accounts are for a "micro" or small company.
20/33 Thanet Eye was concerned that Musgrave and Cartner would not develop Manston as an airport and Musgrave was confident that they would be able to do so. They may have tried their best but in 2014-2019 when they owned the site it was not relaunched and renovated as a fully
21/33 operational airport.
22/33 The next section is lifted verbatim from the wikipedia entry of Pauline Bradley
23/33 "In November 2013 Bradley became co-director with Ann Gloag of Manston Skyport Ltd, which acquired Manston Airport in Kent, from New Zealand company Infratil for a token payment of £1.Despite assurances of ongoing investment in aviation activity given to staff and local
24/33 politicians, the airport was closed shortly after in May 2014, with 144 redundancies. The aviation related assets were auctioned off. In September 2014 Bradley became the sole founding director of Lothian Shelf 718 Ltd (later renamed Stone Hill Park Ltd) , a company set up
25/33 to acquire and redevelop the 800 acre site for housing. UK Companies House records show Lothian Shelf 718/Stone Hill Park as being funded by a wholly owned subsidiary of Highland Global Transport (parent company of Stagecoach Group) ,Kent Facilities Ltd .
26/33 Bradley's involvement in the Manston closure came under close scrutiny in February 2015 when she was called to give evidence before the Parliamentary Transport Select Committee. The chair of the committee, Louise Ellman MP, suggested to Bradley that, in light of her ongoing
27/33 directorship of Lothian Shelf 718, and the company's funding by Ann Gloag, Manston Skyport's claim to have sold the Manston site on to "regeneration specialists' could be "deliberately misleading".
28/33 In June 2015 Bradley, still a director of Stone Hill Park, became a director of Stagecoach and Manston Skyport parent Highland Global Transport Ltd" End of Wikipedia quote.
29/33 From 2015 onwards Manston was being kept on standby for Operation Stack and the owners were paid millions by the DfT
30/33 Riveroak then acquired the site in 2019 and tried to relaunch it as an airport but were blocked by a court ruling against the government's plan to develop the site as an airport in February 2020
31/33 Then came Brexit... and Manston is now a lorry park for the foreseeable future. Stone Hill Park are weirdly still operating the site and they and Riveroak are being paid millions.
32/33 What is the moral? The chaos gripping the UK which has no strategy either for its place in the world geopolitically or for its transport infrastructure combined with what looks like poor contract management have created Manston and will contribute to the country's decline
33/33 longer term.
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