FLASH
Shkruar nga Hugo Daniel 
Graham King, the 'king' of immigrant hotels...
The Wetlands of Anvey Island lie on the edge of the Thames Estuary, 30 miles east of London. It was here, among the alluvial fields, that Jack King, a timber shack salesman from Romford, moved his young family in the early 1960s. The entrepreneur and die-hard football fan bought a bankrupt holiday park. from the local council, and turned it into a successful mobile home business, Kings Park, which he sold for £32m in 2007. It laid the foundations for the family fortune.
His son Graham was determined to follow in his father's footsteps. He spent years working for Jack - who also owned a taxi company, a car dealership and nightclubs - before striking out on his own. In 1999 Graham founded the real estate company Clearsprings.
Since then, Clearsprings has won a number of hefty government contracts to provide short-term housing, mostly for asylum seekers. A growing number of refugees - most from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, some desperate and crammed into small boats - doubled the firm's profits to £62.5m in January 2023.
So great is the success of his business - in which he has a 97 per cent stake - that today Graham, 57, is included in The Sunday Times Richest List for the first time, with a fortune of estimated at 750 million pounds. The media know little about Graham, who runs Clearsprings from a blue office building near Southend-on-Sea.
Few members of the King family still remain on Canvey Island. His mother died in the 1970s while his father Jack died in 2016. Of Graham's four siblings, one brother, Dennis, died in the 1980s. Another, Jeff, lives in Monaco and one sister, Susan, lives in Mallorca. Only his sister Linda, a hairdresser by profession, still lives there.
The Kings may be largely gone from Canvey - whose motto is 'Ex mare dei gratia', meaning 'From the sea by the grace of God' - but they are far from forgotten. For a time, the family helped fund the "golden era" of Canvey Island FC between 1992-2006, when Jeff was manager of the local football team.
In 2002, they reached the third round of the FA Cup, losing in the end to Burnley. A very fashionable seaside resort during the Victorian era, today Canvey is a beautiful but very secluded community. John Pring, an estate agent who worked for the family, says the Kings are and have been an important family in Canvey.
In the late 1990s, Jack invited Pring to join him on the family's private jet for lunch in Brussels. With them was Graham, then in his early thirties.
"We landed at the airport, took a taxi, went to a restaurant and drank champagne. Then father and son asked him to help them draft a business plan. Graham had heard of a hotel owner who rented out his rooms to the government to house asylum seekers.
Jack came to me and said, “The government is asking people to compete in this tender. Graham thinks it's a good profit opportunity. The idea was to buy a property, rent it to the government and manage it on their behalf" - remembers Pring.
But Graham's financial success did not come without controversy. In 2019, Clearsprings won a £996 million government tender to provide temporary accommodation for asylum seekers in Wales and the south of England until 2029.
In 2021, inspectors described 2 of its centers as "dilapidated" - Napier Barracks in Kent and Penally Camp in Pembrokeshire. About a third of the consulted residents said that asylum seekers had mental health problems.
Meanwhile, last year more than 70 people, including children, slept on the street in protest against 2 hotels managed by the company "Clearsprings in London". They complained that they were crammed into small rooms without enough beds. Meanwhile, a report by Open Democracy last year found that two-thirds of the 1,400 complaints about hotel accommodation made by the charity Migrant Help were about properties managed by Clearsprings.
The company has since been charged with 39 breaches of the Housing Act 2004, and has also had criminal charges brought by Swindon Borough Council, to which it has pleaded not guilty. From October 2023, the government has reduced by 36 percent the number of people staying in "asylum hotels".
However, it is still spending £8.2 million a day to manage and run Clearsprings and other companies. Almost all of Clearsprings' £1.3bn revenue in 2022 - more than £3.5m a day - comes from two ten-year contracts with the Home Office for new entrants to the country.
After founding Clearsprings, Graham's original business partner, Michael Bilkus, sued him in Superior Court over a verbal agreement regarding future ownership and control of the company. The legal battle ended in 2003, when Bilkus agreed to sell his stake (50 percent) to King after being independently evaluated.
Meanwhile Pring, the man who says he wrote the first business plan, has a lingering regret about how his partnership with the King family turned out. He says he entered into a special deal with Graham and Jeff when in 2000 they each paid £1 million for Thorney Bay, another area mobile home park.
He adds that he failed to conclude a shareholder agreement, so he invested everything he had in a company from which he could not receive a salary. He asked King's shareholders if they could pay him a salary for running the project, but they refused, and because he had taken on personal debt and needed money, he allowed them to buy it.
He admits the naivety: "It is a painful subject. I didn't defend myself. "I blame myself and no one else. That's why I still work even though I'm 78 years old". He wishes he could have remained a 50 percent shareholder, as King recently sold the park for "millions and millions of pounds"./ Adapted Pamphlet from "The Sunday Times"
Lini një Përgjigje