Al Habtoor may demolish Dubai Metropolitan Hotel

Dubai-based Al Habtoor Group is reviewing plans to demolish its Metropolitan Hotel and redevelop the site for a new hotel project, its chairman said. The conglomerate, one of the UAE’s largest, is studying plans to include a museum, theatre or mall on the site of the Sheikh Zayed Road hotel and is likely to make an announcement in January, Khalaf Al Habtoor told Dubai Eye. “It is premature now...it is a project. We have several alternative ideas of what we do. Still we haven’t decided, but one of the ideas will be a hotel,” Al Habtoor said. “We are studying whether we do a museum there, theatre, mall, arcade... because it’s a big site and still we haven’t made our decision on that. But soon, I mean let us say, maybe beginning of January we will announce it and we will invite you to come here.” Al Habtoor said he would make a decision on the redevelopment this week. “We make our decision this week. Hopefully that will be sometime in May we will start demolishing,” he said. The conglomerate told Arabian Business that it was still in the early stages of discussion. “It will be premature to give any statement as we are in the preliminary stage of considering many possibilities, hence we are not in a position to provide details and in due time, we will make the appropriate announcement,” it said in an emailed statement. The Al Habtoor Group in October announced it would resume work on an AED1bn hotel project on the Palm Jumeirah. The project, which will be funded by the group, will be the first of several announcements to be made before the end of the year, said Al Habtoor. “The Habtoor Group and I are committed to participating [in Dubai real estate] and meeting my commitments by adding more projects. This is the first of it and this is not the biggest, this is the warm-up,” he told Arabian Business. “This is funded from our own cash flow, it is not funded by any banks.” The five-star hotel, which is expected to open to guests by 2013, will include a spa, private beach, six restaurants and a nightclub, said the group. Construction work on the 330-room hotel was stalled in the wake of Dubai’s debt crisis, which saw property prices in the emirate decline by more than 60 percent from their 2008-peak. Almost half of all projects in the emirate were cancelled or put on hold, as bank loans were called in and developers struggled to pay contractors. The Al Habtoor Group is a holding company for businesses ranging from construction, hospitality, automotive and real estate, run by Habtoor. In 2007, Habtoor sold a 45 percent stake to Australia’s Leighton Holding for $707m.