Previously confidential documents show that whilst Londoners faced an affordable housing crisis, Wandsworth Council negotiated away over 1000 affordable homes on the Battersea Power Station site in order to prop up the failing company Treasury Holdings. The attempt to bail out Treasury with permission to build luxury properties failed, the company went into administration shortly […]
BNP Paribas Real Estate – Marketing tax avoidance to offshore investors
BNP Paribas Real Estate, one of the country’s leading firms of property consultants, and a major contractor to local government in London, has published a marketing brochure demonstrating to potential investors in London property how they can avoid taxes. Should local authorities continue to do business with this company? Who are BNP Paribas? BNP Paribas […]
Pie in the sky – Vauxhall Sky Gardens
OurCity.London reveals more evidence of how leading surveyors cook the books in order to remove affordable housing from a luxury housing development. I first wrote about this case three years ago. Frasers property had been granted planning permission to build a quite specularly ugly tower in Vauxhall in 2008. The original planning permission came with […]
The 8 Albert Embankment Story – An Avoidable Disaster for the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority
Number 8 Albert Embankment will always be a special place for me. Not because of its beauty or design, but because it opened my eyes for the first time to the madness of the London development and town planning industry. The site occupies a prime position in central London, but has lain derelict for over […]
Marking the homework – How developers pay for ‘independent’ checks on their affordable housing deals
After writing my last article on how surveyors appear to be deliberately manipulating valuations in order to reduce the affordable housing obligations on their clients, a number of people commented that those figures are supposed to be checked by financial viability consultants employed by the council. Surely, if the developer is trying to game the system, it […]
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