Quote:
Originally Posted by Vulcan
The Canucks owner also went broke building his own arena.
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Here's an interesting article about it:
To summarize, Arthur Griffiths started building the rink without even having all of the financing in place. A projected $100 million dollar project ended up costing $160 million which is a pretty huge overrun. He then brought in an NBA team at the cost of $125 million with the McCaws as a minority partner. He soon ran into cashflow issues and the Mccaws forced him out.
I don't think this is so much a story about an arena being impossible to finance privately so much as it being a story about Arthur not being a very good business man compared to his father who built the business empire.
http://www.lcshockey.com/issues/57/feature10.asp
Here's a shorter article giving some other reasons why the Canuck went bankrupt:
http://www.taxpayer.com/blog/why-can...krupt--part-2-
It's by the the Canadian Taxpayers federation so it is obviously biased, but I think they make some fair points.