So, the Olympic Stadium, clanger or carve-up? Nearly 72 hours after the dramatic decision to abandon months of negotiations with West Ham we have little choice to make up our own minds.
The Olympic Park Legacy Company, the key body in the process, has had three days to issue a statement or offer some explanation for why it tore up a year’s work, but has still not uttered a word.
Sports minister Hugh Robertson has spoken at length about the threat of “legal paralysis” that prompted the decision, and the OPLC communications team say that for now the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is “taking the lead”.
Not for the first time in the tortuous and flawed history of the stadium, that is a long way from being a satisfactory response.
The Olympic Stadium is a £500m public asset that will now have at least another £95m of taxpayer money spent upgrading it so it is fit to be rented to a football club.
Given that level of public funding the events of the last few weeks deserve proper explanation from OPLC chairman Baroness Ford and chief executive Andrew Altman. Granted, the pair inherited an ill-considered mess when they took on the stadium job, but we could still do with some answers.
Throughout Ford and Altman have been adamant that their process would be robust and would deliver a tenant into the stadium and a return to the taxpayer. Yet 10 months from the Olympic opening ceremony they still can’t tell us who will be using the stadium, how many seats there will be, what facilities it will have – beyond a track – or how much the return will be.
The OPLC say that Ford may be available to discuss what happened, and what happens next, next week. Here’s a few questions she, the government and the Olympic authorities might consider
Does the “legal paralysis” explanation really hold-water?
Tottenham and Leyton Orient were challenging the terms of Newham’s £40m loan to West Ham, claiming it breached European state-aid rules But from the outset the OPLC insisted that its decisions would be water-tight and that legal challenges had been anticipated, so they should have seen it coming.
Perhaps they did. Just 10 days ago I was assured by a senior OPLC source that the Spurs-Orient challenges were “baloney” and that the legal advice was unequivocal. The OPLC would win.
So what happened to turn Tottenham and Orient’s pile of “baloney” into “legal paralysis”? Could it be that new evidence provided by Orient made it far more likely that Newham-West Ham and the OPLC would lose? Or that the anonymous complaint to the European Commission had not been anticipated?
At the very least the OPLC’s legal due diligence looks questionable. If the Newham – West Ham finance package were to be declared illegal there would be no way back for the Hammers or the OPLC.
Legal sources have told me the same lawyers, Eversheds, have advised the OPLC on the bid process and the judicial review. Little wonder then that they keep getting the same answers.
There are a couple of other possible explanations for Monday’s Olympic-class U-turn
Could it be that the 2017 World Athletics Championship bid, a priority for Sebastian Coe as well as Robertson, became the most important factor in government thinking?
You might think that a case of the tail wagging a stadium-sized dog, but don’t underestimate the importance attached to securing a meaningful athletics legacy. It has driven every step of this process
One other thought, a question that West Ham might be able to help answer. Is it possible that the OPLC feared that Karren Brady and Co were considering walking away, or at the very least re-negotiating the terms of their deal?
With the government committed to a track come what may Spurs were definitively out of the race, making West Ham the sole bidder in an uncompetitive market.
In those circumstances I would have tried to renegotiate. Maybe they did too. And maybe that’s the real reason why the OPLC is now preparing tender documents for a £2m a-year rental agreement, with West Ham at the front of the queue.
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