Posted on 02/02/2011 6:27:07 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Chinese bid for UK carrier fails
Created: 2011-2-2
Author:Yang Jian
BRITAIN has rejected a 5 million pound (US$8 million) bid for a junked aircraft carrier from a UK-based Chinese businessman.
The offer was more than double the expected price but Lam Kin-bong, from south China's Guangdong Province, said yesterday he was told he had "failed to provide all the necessary information."
The light aircraft carrier HMS Invincible was decommissioned in 2005 and stripped of engines and weapons.
The 17,000-ton hull was sold by the Disposal Services Agency, an online auction platform under the UK Ministry of Defence.
A Turkish ship recycling factory won the bid at a price Lin said was far lower than his. The auction website has yet to publish the final price, but Chinese media quoted estimates of around 2 million pounds.
"I feel quite disappointed because I planned to turn the warship into a floating international school off the coast of Guangdong," Lam, 48, told the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po newspaper.
He said he had organized a professional team, including a British lawyer, accountant and consultant to prepare all the necessary material for the bid, the Zhuhai Evening News in Lam's hometown said.
Lam, who moved to London nearly 20 years ago and runs a restaurant chain in Birmingham, said he would continue bidding for other decommissioned warships on the online platform.
The Wen Wei Po report said there were suspicions that Lam's bid failed for "political reasons."
The British authorities might suspect that the Chinese government or military authority was behind Lam's bid, the newspaper said.
Lam had said previously that his bid had the support of the Chinese embassy in the UK.
But Lam said his intention was purely commercial and had nothing to do with the military.
"We wanted to convert it into an international school to help foster communication and cultural ties between China and Britain," he told the newspaper. He said that if permission to tow the vessel to China had been withheld, he would dock it in Liverpool.
Military analysts said it was unlikely that the warship could go back into service.
The hull would have no military use, Song Xiaojun, a defense analyst in Beijing, told the Zhuhai newspaper.
The carrier had served for 28 years in naval campaigns including conflicts in the Falklands, Iraq and the Balkans. It could carry 22 warplanes and nearly 1,100 sailors.
What’s to prevent the Chicom’s from buying that carrier from the Turks?Who will stop the sale?
Now they are almost finished refitting it into a fully operational large deck aircraft carrier.
“I feel quite disappointed because I planned to turn the warship into a floating international school off the coast of Guangdong,”
Riiiight! Just like that floating casino!
Since they are unwilling to defend themselves with this vessel (or apparently any other vessel), and are unable to imagine that so august a lady deserves to be made into a museum, they should at least have the decency to dispose of her as a target ship. That way she gets to go out in a blaze of glory.
If they go through with this, they might as well recycle the HMS Victory for kindling wood.
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The Vanguard was a true beauty of naval construction, you are lucky to have seen her.
She was very much part of the landscape I grew up with - for most of my childhood she lay mothballed in Portsmouth Harbour, and I would see her profile every day in the distance as I biked to school.
Gee, why do you think they didn't believe the b.s. this time?
Next, please.
No engines. Can't maneuver. And you wouldn't even want to take a target like that in tow.
HMS Vanguard was one of the best deals in battlewagon history -- she made up for some of the serious coin the Admiralty had spent on her predecessors, in the lush days of lily-gilding and overbuilding. Her main batteries came from the "light battlecruisers" HMS Glorious and Courageous ("eggshells armed with hammers") and saved a very great deal of money in Vanguard's building and fitting-out. Those 15" batteries were a little slow-firing, at one round per minute, and the ship was said to be slow by comparison with contemporaries. I don't know how fast she was supposed to be -- her "Fast Division" peers were good for 24-25 kts, the "R's" for about 21, same as US prewar construction (the "Pearl Harbor battleships"); and the US North Carolina class were good for 27, stretch 28 knots, the lower end of the range for "fast battleships" in WW II. The interwar-built Japanese flagship, IJNS Nagato, would do 26 kts, and their Kongo-class ships, built as battlecruisers in WW I, were 27-knot ships even after up-armoring and adding pagoda foremasts between the wars. Bismarck did 30 kts in combat, Iowas were reputedly good for 35 kts, and the Italian Littorio class 40.
Eh? Project much, ChiCom troll?
British battleships were very different from US or even German battleships. As a rule, the Royal Navy sacrificed speed and striking power for endurance and economy. The strength of the Royal Navy was in numbers on the high seas and in combined arms everywhere else. At any rate, the RN didn’t have to chase the enemy, they already surrounded the enemy without even leaving port! It worked very well for them in WW2, especially in the Med.
Where gambling happens. Chinese communist humor against the West, "Gambling" that they can raise up a blue water fleet right under the nose of the West...
First thing I thought also!
Or, they could turn it into a baby milk factory...
The HMS Invincible is about 22,000 tons vs the Varyag of 55,000 tons. My understanding is that the first indigenous carrier will be about 50-60,000 tons. Why would they need the HMS Invincible? Or do you feel China wants to diversify and have greater numbers of smaller carriers as well as larger carriers?
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