The Cook Islands saga
p. 11 · Read in the full issue
The Cook Islands Sheraton hotel pro ject was first managed by Pichi.The 200room luxury hotel has been brought to a halt for over a year, and is now gradu ally being recolonised by tropical forest in the island state.
Originally a US$3l million project, the costs have since been revised to US$5l million.
The Sheraton was being built by the government-owned Effington Cook Islands, which in 1987 borrowed the funds from Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Credito per il Lavoro Italiano all’Estero CLS SpA bank, underwritten by an Italian loan insurer, SASE SpA. The first contractor, Sicel SpA, went broke and then the project was taken over by Stephany SpA, an Italian construction company.
Pichi had been Sicel’s South Pacific area manager in Rarotonga in May 1990.
He supervised the Sheraton project.
In 1993, when construction was near ly complete, the entire project came to a standstill because of what Cook Islands Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Henry referred to as “corruption-relat ed” arrests in Italy (which at the time was running its “clean hands” anti-cor ruption operation). During this opera tion in Italy, people involved in the Sheraton project were arrested.
Henry revealed last month that Italian insurers had been in the Cook Islands recently. He said the Italians did a “local survey of the situation themselves, and they are fairly pleased with what has happened. They didn’t even think there was a hotel built out there”.
Henry said that as a result of the visit, he expected Italian funding to resume “and we’ll be able to get work going on that hotel very shortly”.