BETTY'S EARLY EDITION - Connecting the environment to everything in the age of disconnection.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
FOR THE LOVE OF THE OLYMPICS?
OH, FOR THE LOVE OF THE OLYMPICS!
Love? Oh, no. It’s actually money. For everybody but us Vancouverites who have to shell out for this huge province wide construction party masquerading as a civic celebration (oh, all right, everybody in the province pays). We’re supposed to do it for love. Do what exactly? Well, let’s just consider the Athlete’s Village.
Okay, so a lot of figures are boring. Even to me. So I’ll keep it simple. There’s a corporation named Millennium Development Corp. They got the nod to build the Athletes’ Village on Southeast False Creek for the Olympics which will include 1100 condos of which 250 will belong to the City after the games. For this privilege Millennium will pay us, the city, 193 million, of which 30 million will be a down payment. These condos are not for the working poor. They will go for between 500,000 and 6 million all of which they plan to pre sell. Millennium will also receive over 82 million for building the units and we will do the site fixing at another 153 million. There are two directors (Shahram and Sharokh Malekyazdi) who hold no board meetings, issue no shares and do not file the required annual financial paper with the provincial Ministry of Finance. They are partnered with Armeco Group of Companies.
Armeco currently has only one director, a lawyer who recently headed the Vancouver NPA party (Paul Barbeau). But where can these corporations, wealthy though they are, get such huge amounts of money? Well, there are two lenders… The Fortress Credit Corporation and guess who?
Well, bust my britches! It’s us! The City of Vancouver! Which means that we, us, yes us, the tax payers of Vancouver will be lending a hunk, or even most (maybe all?) of the start up money to Millennium who is supposed to pay us, for God’s sake. But somehow they have it fixed so that we pay them for borrowing money from us so they can make billions. But if we, Vancouver, have this kind of money to lend out for the already super rich people so they don’t have to use their own money why don’t we do something about the homeless? Or affordable housing? No money for that? Or money in that? Well, back to Millennium and Armeco. These two, along with Gordon Campbell simply take my breath away. Their ability to pull off such a gigantic public robbery in secret takes stealth and cunning the likes of which makes Lord Black look rather amateurish. I think Gordon Campbell, VANOC, Millennium and Fortress along with Paul Barbeau are guilty of conspiracy to defraud the public. I’ll be pouring over my law books. This has got to be against the law. Betty Krawczyk
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7 November, 2008
ReplyDeleteHow do you feel today, Betty? Vindicated-plus-plus. It took them a while, but the truth is finally beginning to seep out. Kudos to the person who had the intestinal fortitude to blow the whistle before the municipal election.