Nauru's 'hotel' stands silent

(Prom a Nauru correspondent) The site of the Central Pacific Hotel venture at Meneng today is a lonely place. Only a short time ago the area was alive with trades men, bull-dozers and trucks un loading equipment and furnish ings; the scene today is one of silence and solitude, a quiet only broken by the surf on the reef.

The unfinished hotel is boarded up, notices tell the public to keep off the property, and caretakers, Andy and Shirley Russell, a Scots couple who came from Sydney to work in the Pacific Sporting Pools organisation, now find themselves the only survivors of the Euro pean work-force of 70 or more.

The ambitious pools company was in trouble from the moment the Australian State Governments made known their objections to Nauru-based football pools, and the early weeks of the venture showed such a feeble response by the Australian public that the concern was bound to founder.

So many rumours circulated the island about the financial troubles

of the footy pools, that it came as no surprise to hear the Nauru Government announce on July 11 that it would not provide any financial assistance to the Pacific Sporting Pools Ltd. and the subsidiary Central Pacific Hotels Ltd. except that justified on humanitarian grounds.

The government said that if it were formally asked to assist in the repatriation of pools and hotel people to Australia it would do so. Five days later it was asked to help repatnate 62 people to Australia. Until those people were flown out, the British Phosphate Commissioners kept the hotel site community supplied with electricity and essential food supplies.

Local people were extremely sorry for the predicament that most hotel people found themselves in. Typical was the case of a young New Zealand tradesman who returned to Sydney with his wife and baby still owed several hundred dollars in pay.

To describe the whole venture

as a fiasco is to take a kindly view. But many of the Nauruan people expressed little or no con cern over the success or failure of the Pools; they had managed quite well without such a busi ness on the island before and its collapse raised no ripple to dis turb Nauruan life.

The problem that now interests those who are interested at all is whether the hotel will be pur chased and completed. For a little while there was a hope that creditors in the Pacific Sporting Pools Ltd. would be induced to convert their debts into debentures to enable the company, with the help of a bank loan, to finish the hotel.

But not enough creditors were prepared to go along with that and on August 14, the managing director of Pacific Sporting Pools, Mr. W. M. Mayberry, announced that there “was no other course but for the bank to make applica tion to the court in Nauru for an order to wind up the company and for a liquidator to be

appointed.”