From Bahamas to the UK, the super rich tussle over real estate
OLIGARCHIC CLICKBAIT
A wealthy Saudi royal has fallen out with his co-investors in a luxury resort development or, as Bloomberg put it in a headline that calls to me like vodka to an alcoholic: “Saudi Prince Locked in $5 Million Fight Over 'James Bond Island.’” A day may come when I’ll be able to resist finding out what’s going on here, but it is not this day.
The Bahamas has almost 700 islands, of which only a few dozen are inhabited. Since Bahamians don’t make much of anything that anyone else wants (seriously, I spent two hours scouring the market for presents for my kids and ended up buying three small “rum cakes” that tasted just like ordinary sponge cakes, and cost me $25), they sell what they do have — sun, sand, competitive offshore services, and overpriced confectionary to guilty-feeling fathers who abandoned their families for a week. What the Bahamas do have, however, is plenty of real estate, which — if you spend more than $500,000 on it — comes with the attractive bonus of Bahamian permanent residency, and thus the country’s highly competitive zero tax rate.
As of this moment, around 20 Bahamian islands are advertised as for sale on the website of specialist estate agency “Vladi Private Islands,” including Big Darby Island (a snip at $35 million), or the more entry-priced Cat Cay. The names, incidentally, are negotiable. When Hog Island was bought by A&P heir Huntington Hartford in the 1950s, he re-branded it as Paradise Island. It is now home to many of the country’s more boujee resorts, something that would surely not have happened if it had retained its original porcine moniker.
Anyway, back in 2015 Vladi put the 220-acre island Cave Cay on the market for $90 million (the Guardian featured it in their Surreal Estate section, which appears to be where the “James Bond” connection comes from), promising “stunning natural beauty, a protected and private, deep-water harbor and marina with floating cement dock system and 35 dock slips, plus a 2,800 ft. private airstrip.”