Treasury Holdings will review the re-opening of the competition for London's Dome before deciding whether to abandon the bid, its chief executive said yesterday.
Mr Maurice Harte said the Dublin property firm had not ruled out legal action to recover its tranche of the £12 million sterling (€19.2 million) spent on the bid by its Legacy consortium. It still believed the plan to develop a "knowledge city" at the troubled tourist attraction was "the best for the Dome", Mr Harte added.
This was despite a decision by the British government yesterday to strip Legacy of its "preferred-bidder status". A Cabinet Office spokesman said that decision was taken because the deadline of February 14th had passed and a number of questions surrounding the Legacy bid remained.
Legacy is led by London-based property developer Mr Robert Bourne, who is a supporter of the Blair government. Yet if its bid was accepted, Treasury was to take 75 per cent of the Dome.
The bid was valued at £125 million, although Mr Harte said "considerable" additional expenditure was required to develop its plan.
Mr Harte said he was surprised to learn only in media reports that Legacy had lost preferred-bidder status.
While accepting the deadline to conclude a deal had passed, he said the consortium had attended a positive meeting with the authorities last Monday. "We thought we'd satisfied all the criteria that any reasonable human being could."
Mr Harte rejected suggestions that its bid was flawed because it had failed to secure contracts from large IT firms to locate operations in the Dome.
The consortium had "considerable interest" from the IT sector and had signed initial agreements with certain companies. It could not secure firm contracts without outright ownership of the Dome.
Other groups that have expressed an interest in bidding for the former Millennium attraction include groups led by the Dome's former chief executive, Mr Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, and the Duke of Westminster.
A British government spokesman said last night there had been 70 expressions of interest in the Dome in recent weeks and some were serious, heavyweight proposals. The affair is seen as a serious embarrassment to the British government.
