What crisis? Rundown town pins hopes on haven for the super-rich

Yes Virginia, the rich really are different from you and me....


"And this will be a hotel", said Oliver Corlette, as he pointed out a wasteland of brambles and rubble with a sweep of the hand. In the distance, beyond a portable lavatory tilted alarmingly to one side, a Soviet submarine had been taken out of the water and put up on blocks.

Corlette is the managing director of Porto Montenegro, an extravagantly ambitious project that links two of the figures in the controversy surrounding the balmy summer nights that Britain's shadow chancellor, George Osborne, and new business secretary, Peter Mandelson, spent on Corfu.

Nat Rothschild and Oleg Deripaska, who each hosted the British politicians on the Greek island, are minority shareholders in a plan to turn a former cold war naval base north of Corfu into what Corlette describes as "one of the largest, if not the largest, facility for yachts of 30 metres and over in the Mediterranean".

There is a touch of Ian Fleming about the scheme. It is the brainchild of Peter Munk, a refugee from Nazi Germany who settled in Canada and founded the world's biggest gold mining company, Barrick Gold.

"It's what he's been dreaming about for 20 years," Corlette said. Munk, a noted philanthropist, hoped the project could transform the fortunes of tiny Montenegro, he said. "This country will go from being one of the poorest [countries] in Europe to one of the richest in a generation."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/27/corfu-oleg-deripaska-nat-rothschild