Manchester sold itself to Abu Dhabi’s elite - Guardian article

Tbf he is right in the sense the council have been whoring the city out and selling it or allowing the selling of swathes of land and property to any old ****, but it is wrong to focus on Abu Dhabi when there are plenty others too.

Seems that this bellend is only focusing on what he deems most clickbaitable.

This guys article isn't important or relevent for the club and I will give this seemingly one sided bit of journalism the time and energy to care it deserves.. none
 
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Mazzarelli's Swiss Cheese said:
Of course the council were desperate and the lad was bought at a knock down price - East MCR/Bradford etc was a fucking post industrial dump
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Cheap land usually comes with contamination. The developers have to spend a fortune to clean it up and dispose it offsite. The land around the stadium was highly contaminated as a legacy of munitions factories....throw in an abandoned mine which the council had stuffed with landfill. I'm surprised they didn't have to give it away!

Doesn't excuse developers of every stripe and race weighing off their legal obligations to affordable housing under Section 106 (Planning). More than a little whiff of corruption.
 
The Pandorica Opened said:
Not sure why everyone is so rattled by this. We don't support the Abu Dhabi United Group, after all.

It's a complicated conversation about allowing interests like these to buy out the areas they do, with fairly obvious positives and negatives. Nothing wrong with an article about it, written with obvious research behind the points, and the best response to it isn't bland old buzzwords like "agenda", "Grauniad", or whatever, which only serves to bring the same old "Al-Manchester", "Oil Clasico" stuff in return - but reading the information from all sources and coming to your conclusions based on that; not just that the same investment group has made your favourite football club rich.

I think the problem is that the housing market has been fucked harder than Mia Malkova by the economics we've had since the 70's, which makes it hard to assess the success of any one particular project with that context. Personally, I don't think the investments are any great ground for criticism, although I do understand the doubts. I will say that criticising the investment on the grounds of the (atrocious) humans-rights record of the UAE is a weak point; it simply isn't relevant, unless you think Mansour intends to convert east-Manchester into an enclave of the UAE with it's own para-military force. His dealings with City are also completely besides the point. However, the murkiness of the purchase and it's surveying are more salient. All in all, I can only say that it's borderline-impossible to assess a single project without the obvious context of the housing market in 2022. Solutions should come a well-funded and common-sense government prepared to house it's own citizens. This isn't ideal, but nothing about housing/land is, right now.
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The human rights record of the UAE isn’t atrocious. Atrocious suggests among the worst, which it absolutely isn’t. In relative terms, it’s pretty good. Better than the USA and Russia I would say, but discernibly worse than Sweden and Japan.
 
This is no different to what has happened/is happening in London. Foreign money investing and buying up everything, making dodgy deals with councils and paying them off with top up's instead of delivering 'affordable housing'. There's gonna be skyrises that are empty in Manchester, bought through foreign investment as Manchester will be a safe bet, just as London is, to keep your money secure. There's tonnes of articles on The Guardian about foreign investment in London, the difference here is this one is laying a lot of the blame squarely at Sheikh Mansour. He has in fact just done what every other wealthy person has done, but he's got in there early when Manchester was fuck all and now of course he is making the bulk of the profit. This is more negligence on the councils part, clearly they were under pressure but safeguards should be in place when you are selling/leasing off assets like this. It's not as if they're collectively learning from their mistakes though, loads of Stockport has been sold off, they gave about 35% of the ownership group of Manchester & Stansted airports to a foreign fund, IFM Investors. Article is very pointy at Mansour, but also at councils who are blindly following London's lead even though they're always complaining about them.
 
Did he not notice the fella who owns boohoo has scores of land and property all over the same area with deals with MCC, neverimnd them other lot who renovated all the high rises in platting.

Selective journalism in lumping it mainly on abu dabhi(I know it is based on a specific report), when the council are dodgy land deals/compulsary purchase specialists
 
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The Pandorica Opened said:
Not sure why everyone is so rattled by this. We don't support the Abu Dhabi United Group, after all.
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Judging by the reactions to this article. I'm not sure this is true anymore.

This article is a critcism of MCC and its policies. If you replaced Sheikh Mansour and ADUG with any other Billionaire or Wealth Fund, every single comment would be criticising the council.

And yet because it's about ADUG, people are falling over themselves to defend it. More interested in which football club the author supports, or digging up where he might have lived than what the substance of the Sheffield University study.

Quite a few of the comments pretty clearly haven't even read the article, let alone the study it links to.

I think there's loads of ways people could have chosen to disagree with the article rationally, but when you see people trying to use the Glazers as some sort of defence or going off on rants about the Grauniad agenda...you realise that any boundaries between supporting Manchester City and supporting ADUG have been completely eroded and to a lot of people on here, criticising a council deal with ADUG is attacking Manchester City and its fans.
 
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domalino said:
Judging by the reactions to this article. I'm not sure this is true anymore.
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Do you think MCC have done the right thing, do you think they have severely undervalued their land, or somewhere in between where they sold off the first lot of land cheaply, shown other investors the opportunity and have raised prices accordingly?
 
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