Monday 20 June 2016

Dreamland lease assigned for charge to offshore company in Caymen Islands?


The Cayman Islands
There was good news from Dreamland over the weekend as it celebrated its first birthday. The park lifted the entrance fee a move met with widespread approval. But news has emerged today that an offshore company, Arrowgrass Masterfund Limited, based in the Cayman Islands has been assigned the lease to Dreamland from operators, Sands Heritage Limited on May 27th in return for the sum of £600,000. The charge document is available to download for free on the Companies House website.



The lease was signed on May 21st 2015 between Thanet District Council and Sands Heritage Limited for the Dreamland site.





Sands Heritage Limited recently went administration owing creditors just under £3m. The agreement states Arrowgrass Masterfund Limited loan is for £600,000. 



Who are Arrowgrass Masterfund Limited?Well, we don't know, because the company is registered off shore. But we have heard of Arrowgrass Capital Partners LLP and this is listed as their correspondence address in the UK.


Arrowgrass Capital Partners LLP is the hedgefund that Sands Heritage Limited boss, Nick Conington lists on his Linkedin  page as having worked for from 2008 to 2012. Arrowgrass Capital Partners grew out of the market leading convertible bond franchise at Deutsche Bank.
Source: Linkedin

Companies House records also show a further charge of £1m to Sands Heritage Limited from June 1st 2015 from a Christopher John Mahoney who is based in the Netherlands. Mahoney and Conington were both part of the winning Oxford University boat race crew in 1980.
Oxford Cambridge boat race crews 1980

Mahoney, is a retired director of agriculture trading of the world's largest commodities trading company, Glencore. A headline in the Independent stated:

"We'll make a killing out of food crisis, Glencore trading boss Chris Mahoney boasts" With Mahoney quoted:
"The environment is a good one. High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities."We will be able to provide the world with solutions... and that should also be good for Glencore."

Surely, questions now arise:

- What does the agreement between Arrowgrass Masterfund Limited and Sands Heritage Limited mean for the future of Dreamland as an amusement park? 
- Has the future operation of Dreamland been transferred to an offshore company? What role did freeholders and funders Thanet District Council play in the transfer? 
- What role do funding partners The Dreamland Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund play?

- Is Dreamland as an amusement park safe from being developed into anything other than an amusement park?


Post edit:
Ed Targett has also published a post 

Wednesday 1 June 2016

Save Dreamland...Again!



News broke over the weekend that Sands Heritage Limited (SHL) the company chosen by Thanet District Council in November 2014 as the preferred operator to run Dreamland, has gone into administration. The fact that SHL haven't made it through a full year since signing the lease agreement the night before Margate's historic amusement park opened on  June 19th 2015 is shocking. Sadly, however, unsurprising. 

“We signed the lease the night before we opened in June, after a year of negotiation,” he says. “It was a very complex deal." Nick Conington, Chairman of Sands Heritage Ltd, Property Week, November 6, 2015.
What's incredibly frustrating is how it's come to this. Dreamland is the historic Margate brand, internationally renowned the world over, over many generations of holidaymakers. The subject of a twelve year campaign of sheer will and hard graft by a dedicated group of die hard volunteers and many many supporters wider afield. It developed from a grass roots campaign into a charitable trust. Yet when SHL's marketing and sponsorship manager describes Dreamland as: "one of the South East’s best kept secrets, but as we approach our one-year anniversary, the time has come to grow awareness nationwide. " you know you might need to worry.

It's easy to forget that there wouldn't be a Dreamland for  SHL to sell brand partnerships with without this campaign. After all the hard work of legally securing the site from developers, Dreamland was handed into the care of officials who's job it was to take it forward to the finish line of opening to the public. The people who really cared for it as a vision aren't the people who decided to open it on June 19th 2015. This early date also raised eyebrows at the Heritage Lottery Fund, Dreamland's principle grant funder in an email to the Dreamland Trust on May 1st 2015, released by a Freedom of Information request stating that SHL should bear the full responsibility of this decision. 

Somewhere along the line, care hasn't been taken to keep this publicly funded project to the tune of millions on track (where is the heritage and education learning centre?), ensuring the best outcome for Margate and for the people who put in literally thousands of hours into ensuring Dreamland didn't become another lucrative residential and retail development site in the centre of town.

The fact that we the public are still far from clear about the legal status of Sands Heritage Limited's now 100 years lease (negotiated up from 25 years during the tender process) tells us something. 

Quite simply, what most people want to know: is Dreamland safe? 

If a commercial operator like SHL fail to make a viable go of Dreamland, will SHL's conduct be assessed and Dreamland as a park come back to the Thanet Council for another potential operator to have a go at running the park in the model it was publicly funded for?

Because it seems to me that the people involved in Dreamland in the last 18 months aren't working on the Dreamland I'd envisaged through the campaign period. The other day, I came across Sands Heritage Limited appointed PR firm Kallaway claim to having "increased ticket sales by 500%' (that and raising house prices in the area by 24%!) for the same time period SHL were claiming at court poor ticket sales as the reason they'd amassed almost £3m of debts and laying the blame at the door of Thanet District Council for, among other aspects, not getting The Scenic Railway up and running in time for their June 19th 2015 launch.

SHL having signed the lease on the 18th of June and having had a number of regular meetings with the Council will no doubt have been aware of the status of the Scenic Railway. All available evidence so far released show it was SHL that pushed for that June 2015 opening date. I've yet to see a document of SHL complaining the Scenic not being open for June 19th was going to ruin their plans. If anyone has got this evidence, I'd love to see it.


After entering mediation, Thanet Council handed SHL a further £1,050,000 in December 2015 and rumour has it a further seven years rent free on top of the initial seven, bringing it to 14 years rent free.

Who knew that after the major campaign victory of the securing the site via a lengthy compulsory purchase legal battle that the Save Dreamland badges and posters might have to again come out of the cupboard to fight for the park's future? 

Well, perhaps those of us that questioned SHL's lack of experience in amusement parks compared to other bidders. And as Ed Targett has pointed out on his blog posts here and here even their CVA (company voluntary agreement) was fantastical in claiming they would bring in £7m in revenue between November 2015 and November 2016. Do cast your mind back to how many days Dreamland was actually open from December 2015 to now.

There are many questions to be answered. So many, that I think only a public inquiry will do. Dreamland is a big deal to Margate. It's a big deal to Thanet, a district that can ill afford to lose this amount of money and a valuable seafront leisure asset. We need to scrutiny of the figures and scrutiny of the management of this crucial 12 year project.

How much public money has actually been invested and how much have SHL invested?

According to a Thanet Council's presentation to the Corporate Review Working Party on September 30th 2015, SHL were listed as having invested only £200,000 with the vast share of investment picked up by the public purse.




Save Dreamland...Again! #SaveDreamlandAgain

Post edit: Do contact me if you can shed any light on any of the mysteries in this post.