- Third instalment: Expose News publishes the latest interview with entrepreneur Mitch Sorbie, as he escalates his attack on poor Manx governance
- ‘£90m question’: The Isle of Man First party founder warns Lord Street debacle will land taxpayers with an eye-watering bill
- ‘New ferry terminal?’ He says the dispute is starting to echo the Liverpool project cost spiral – and lack of a final figure
- Accountability challenge: ‘No one’s held accountable!’ The Douglas businessman claims infrastructure failures are rewarded, not punished
- MONEYVAL shadow: He links competence, record-keeping and reputation to looming international scrutiny
- Costs and cover ups: Sorbie says secrecy and delay fuel public anger – and the hidden totals only grow
In this latest instalment of our interview, Sorbie says the £90m Lord Street litigation now risks sliding into the same pattern as the Liverpool ferry terminal: spiralling totals, unclear accountability, and the public left asking what the final bill really is.
‘I think the Lord Street situation is an absolute disaster….’ Sorbie said, adding that the basic outline of the dispute should alarm taxpayers: ‘From what I can gather, one person was offered the contract…..and then it was reneged on.’
Sorbie’s concern is the scale of the claim – and the reality that, if the claimant wins, the bill lands on the public.
‘The person that was offered the contract is now suing for….like £90 million… And what people forget is that has to be picked [up] if they win the case,’ he said. ‘And there’s a strong possibility they could win the case. That’s a taxpayer that has to pick up that tab.’
The long-running legal battle over the failed redevelopment of Douglas’s Lord Street site is a running sore for the Isle of Man government.
Two departments are facing renewed scrutiny over missing records, disputed email trails and the slow drip of disclosure in a case with a potential price tag of up to £90 million.
He framed Lord Street as part of a wider problem: too much government, too little consequence when things go wrong.
Sorbie cited what he described as workforce figures to illustrate the strategic point: ‘I think the latest statistics are 36,000 people working on the island of which eight or 9,000 of them work in government.
‘So that tells you how big the government is for such a small place.
‘But no one’s held accountable.’
Twice, he contrasted the situation with private enterprise, in which overspends and failure are punished.
To make his case, the Just Pizza and Pasta owner reached for a high-profile UK example: ‘You look at when Scotland built their parliament that was told it was going to be… £28 million, then it was £50 million, and it ended up £500 million. Now, if you were in private enterprise, by the time it got to 70 million… you’d be out.’
For Sorbie, the Isle of Man now has its own cautionary tale: the Liverpool ferry terminal project, in which ministers have repeatedly declined to put a definitive number on the total cost while legal matters remain unresolved.
‘We have a similar situation with Liverpool… where we still don’t know how much it’s cost,’ he said. ‘I would say it’s probably £100, £110 million.’
His argument is that the public would respect honesty more than opacity.
‘For people [to] have more respect for a government [it should] stand up and say, “Yeah, we’ve messed up. It’s 110 million. There’s nothing else we can do about it. We have to pay it. Let’s just go on with it,”’ he said. ‘As opposed to, “Well, we don’t know how much it’s costing. Who’s writing the cheques? Is this never ending?”’
He applied the same logic to the £90 Million Lord Street case.
At the centre of the dispute is Sondica Group Inc, which says its consortium was originally told it had been selected as preferred bidder for a major regeneration scheme, only for the project to be pulled and re-tendered.
Sondica is suing the Department of Infrastructure and Treasury, alongside London-based consultants Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH), alleging negligent misstatement and misfeasance in public office.
Once a dispute hardens into years of legal warfare, said Sorbie, cost control becomes secondary -and the accountability loop breaks – implying that settlement is the most reasonable solution.
‘That’s where government needs to be held accountable,’ he added, arguing that within the system ‘people are moved up the chain’ for pay reasons, sometimes ‘promoted into a job that they’re not qualified to do to earn more money’.
‘You have people running the show that aren’t qualified,’ he said.
However, there maybe more hope than Sorbie wreckons – recently the two ministers in charge of the two departments who are being sued have been replaced.
In moving Chris Thomas into Treasury and Tim Crookall into Infrastructure, Chief Minister Alf Cannan has signalled a new approach.
A prominent businessman on the island told Expose News: ‘Mitch is well respected here because he’s a pragmatist – in that sense he has more in common with Crookall and Thomas than he thinks.
‘None of these men would have allowed Lord Steet or the Liverpool ferry terminal to get where they are risk-wise…to get to these money levels – they would have been settled years ago.’
This is Expose News’ third instalment of our interview with Isle of Man ‘pizza boss’ and political campaigner Mitch Sorbie. You can read the first two instalments here:
