The Gullah lived in Cain Hoy, South Carolina. Cain Hoy Enterprises, LLC ended their Spurs takeover interest.
A day after West Ham categorically refused to share the Olympic Stadium with Tottenham as tenants, Cain Hoy Enterprises, LLC announced that they had terminated their interest in buying Spurs. Uncertainty over a temporary home and delays with a new stadium might have been factors in the decision to pull out. The present owner Joe Lewis was willing to sell Spurs for £1bn but that valuation included the stadium. However, Cain Hoy have kept their options for a future bid open.
An earlier article on Soccerblog provided a snapshot of the prospective owners. Jonathan Goldstein, a former Gerald Ronson sidekick provides the inside track to the football world as a Spurs fan. Cain Hoy is an offshoot of Guggenheim Partners, diversified and global real estate investors and advisors, now surreptitiously but relentlessly moving into the sports, media and entertainment world signaled through their bring down the house LA Lakers buyout. The Lakers public face is Magic Johnson but the ownership’s serious money, $2.15bn of it was all theirs. Guggenheim Partners with almost $200 bn in capital lubrication are on the prowl for more acquisitions. Along the way some controversial bedfellows have joined their quest for gold dust. The SEC are scrutinizing the firm’s connection with Michael Milken, rehabilitated junk bond aristocrat, for investing $800m into their assets. The founder of Guggenheim Partners is Peter Lawson -Johnston II, the great grandson of Solomon Guggenheim, immortalized by the distinctive Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao that house his assiduously built art collections, one of the largest in the world. From art to the art of making money that is Lawson-Johnston Jr’s transformative resurrection.
The intriguingly named Cain Hoy refers to the former plantation holding in Charleston, South Carolina of Harry Frank Guggenheim which after his death, passed onto his cousin and Peter Lawson-Johnston II’s father, Peter O. Lawson-Johnston. Cain Hoy was traditionally home to the Wandos, Native American tribesmen and the Gullah, an African Americans slave community with a unique West African cultural heritage through the 18th and 19th century. Read here for a good flavour of Cain Hoy’s history and Harry Guggenheim’s part in its urbanization.
Lawson-Johnston Sr., parceled those wetlands – a massive tract of 4000 acres into three holding entities which he owns and manages for future development into a large scale residential community, a project spanning the next three decades. The Cain Hoy entities are now being sued by big oil and unabashed environmental polluter, BP Amoco who have a refining plant on the wetland’s northern tip for refusing to provide a buffer zone that would protect the residents from potential oil spills and contaminants. The oil company filed a lawsuit accusing Tract 7, LLC, one of the entities that owns adjoining plantation land of not honouring a letter of intent which would allow BP Amoco to purchase that buffer zone. In exchange, BP Amoco would not challenge the developer’s master plan or zoning text for approval by the Charleston city council.
Tract 7, LLC is now the subject of several individual allegations in the lawsuit, among them “breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, and negligent misrepresentation.”
The three part urbanization project which will bring industrialization and overpopulation to the wetlands is also being challenged by various preservation and historical foundation groups.
Who would have thought BP Amoco would champion environmental safeguards while a real estate developer with Guggenheim DNA recklessly exposes potential home buyers to toxins endangering their health? In which world would a name associated with the new millennium’s worst environmental disaster be bandied in the same breath to a name, a byword in the rarefied climes of art and philanthropy. Well, probably no more because the venture capital Guggenheim would gladly buy out oil assets, after all, Meyer Guggenheim, the patriarch made his fortune over a century ago in commodities and metals. The question is whether Spurs fans like high browed mercenaries in velvet gloves linked to troubling plantation era real estate or smashmouth Roman Abramovich types softening themselves through arty consorts.