Discovery Bay Controversy
In 2005, Akers-Jones briefly emerged from retirement to defend, before Hong Kong's Legislative Council, his role in zoning the Discovery Bay resort project on Lantau in the 1970s. Developers were allowed to build there with the stipulation that it would become a resort, but most of the units were later converted into luxury housing. Akers-Jones was involved in the original zoning decision as the then Secretary for the New Territories. With the new Hong Kong Disneyland having opened nearby and property prices having skyrocketed as a result, suspicions about the fact that the original zoning plan was never enforced have again come to the fore. He criticised the decision to call on an elderly man to testify on the matter, which happened some 30 years earlier. However, he revealed that colonial officials had abruptly changed the zoning of the Discovery Bay project, and gave it to new developers because they feared it would fall into the hands of the former Soviet Union.
Read more about this topic: David Akers-Jones
Famous quotes containing the words discovery, bay and/or controversy:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)