Tottenham insist suggestions of £1.2bn final stadium bill are inaccurate

[striebs]

You generally capitalise all costs associated with a project while it is under construction and beforehand. If it were abandoned, I suppose you would have the partially completed premises valued, based on market value less cost-to-complete, and then write off or write back the difference between that and all costs accumulated to date, including historical costs such as land, also professional fees. That presupposes that you're trying to persuade someone to take over the project and finish it.



No idea.



It is common with projects where there is a general contractor who subcontracts the detailed works. It's also often necessary: bankruptcies and insolvencies are common in construction, because of small margins, negative cash flow and knock-on effects from bankruptcies of clients. I'm not sure how a developer could put this in place for a construction-management contract, because it isn't Mace cash-funding the build. THFC is doing that itself, by letting multiple specialist contracts, with Mace coordinating everything.

If you are concerned about the effects of liquidated damages on Mace, that isn't a concern now: they won't be agreed for many months/years, probably after a long and contentious negotiation.



It's not a surprise that it takes more than a year to build a stadium! it was an exceptionally short programme and even the club agrees that it was a demanding order to get it ready in that time. I can't tell you if it has been "rushed". If parts of the work look shoddy and if many defects arise after it is under management, then we can conclude that it was rushed. There will be defects - there are always defects. But there was never any ambiguity about the ambitiousness of trying to make the stadium usable by Aug/Sept this year.

Thanks for that . I learned quite a bit . Didn't know the relationship between THFC and Mace until you told me .

No I wasn't concerned about liquidated damages and generally reckon they should only be sought as a last resort .

I'm sure Levy would have impressed upon his minions that they must not keep changing their minds and must not try to add enhancements which would constitute scope creep .

The important thing imho is the end result - the stadium . Don't want a repeat of the WHL West Stand with sewerage stains showing through the concrete

 

[Matthew Wyatt]

As I have posted 5-6 times on the New Stadium thread, there is a 20+ year history of journalists pulling the same scam, which is to ask about build costs at the inception of a construction project and then compare them with total development costs when the project is nearing the end. They do this specifically so they can whip up "outrageous cost overrun" stories. Everyone who works in development is familiar with it - we see it in the local press as much as the national press.

In this case, they've used especially egregious language: THFC "face a bill in the region of £1.2bn to complete their new stadium". which makes it sound as if there is a further £1.2bn still to pay. That's not an accident. It's an attempt to mislead.

The Telegraph itself, only a few days ago, published a sensible and reliable "Q&A" about the new stadium, in which it pointed out that 40% of the £850m cost of the overall project represented the stadium proper and that a similar amount of the total cost had been expended many years ago on land, planning consent and other preliminary costs.

The significance of this very last point for football supporters is that those costs do not have to be borrowed, because they were paid up to a decade ago. They probably haven't been represented in past income and expenditure accounts, because they've been capitalised, but the cash has been paid and thus does not represent debt. Rather, it represents equity.

Tedious it may be, but please paste this anywhere it’s remotely applicable. An awful lot of posters seem not to look at the New Stadium thread and the persistent uninformed moaning is tiresome.