Reincarnation Shock at Llanelli’s £250m Wellness Village

Carmarthenshire County Council’s private-sector partner in the £250 million* Wellness and Life Science Village development project at Delta Lakes, Llanelli, a cornerstone of the Swansea Bay City Deal, is a new incarnation of the dissolved Kent Neurosciences Ltd, the company with which the county council signed an exclusivity agreement in 2016.

The new partner, alongside Swansea University, is Sterling Health Security Holdings Ltd, of Longcroft, 8 Windmill Park, Wrotham, Sevenoaks, in Kent, a company started in October 2015, dormant in its first year, and with a negative value of £137,722 and zero cash in the bank and zero employees at the end of its second year, at October 31^st 2017.

The company’s accounts explain that “to continue trading [the company] is dependent on a loan from the directors, who have confirmed their intention to provide financial support to the company for the foreseeable future”.

So the county council’s private-sector partner for a £250 million contract – incidentally the only company to tender for the opportunity – had no money and no employees, but six-figure debts and an ongoing reliance on loans from its directors. It was a small enterprise, but the contract award notice released by the Welsh Government stated somewhat surprisingly that the company is not an SME (a small or medium-sized enterprise).

The directors are Franz Hermann Dickmann (77), Dr Phyllis Holt-Dickmann (66), Rupert Knight Harrison (58), Kevin Stephen Smith (54), James Edward Dickmann (49), and former leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, Meryl Gravell (73).

Franz Dickmann, Phyllis Holt-Dickmann and James Dickmann were all directors of Kent Neurosciences Ltd too, although James Dickmann resigned four years before the company was wound up in May 2018.

Rupert Harrison is listed at Companies House as a banker and attorney, and is a current director of some 19 companies, half of which are new and as at the end of July 2018 had not yet submitted accounts. Kevin Smith is listed as a company director, and apart from Sterling Health Security Holdings is a director of Heart 2 Heart Telemedicine Ltd. Franz Dickmann and Phyllis Holt-Dickmann, the duo who personally control the shares of Sterling Health Security Holdings, as well as serving as directors, are also directors of Heart to Heart Telemedicine Ltd.

Both Franz Dickmann and James Dickmann are former directors of KIMS Hospital Ltd, a private hospital at Maidstone, Kent, which opened in 2014. The hospital has yet to attain profitability. In the year to April 2016 it lost almost £15.89 million, and the following year to April 2017the loss was £9.72 million.

The Wellness Centre is not just about money, of course, but it will need to be profitable if taxpayers are not to be saddled with liabilities, and there must be doubts over the current financial capacity of the West Wales population to buy heavily enough into the wellness vision to ensure its success. West Wales is, after all, one of the poorest parts of North West Europe.

*Swansea University put the cost at £200 million as recently as July, in a press release titled ‘Landmark agreement boost for Llanelli’s £200m Wellness Village’. The contract award notice from the Welsh Government’s Sell2Wales, also in July, said £250 million. In June 2018 Carmarthenshire County Council reckoned the figure was ‘more than £200 million’. So it appears to be, a hefty 25% more.   

PDR

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