Freedom Ship - $10bn Floating City for World’s
Super Rich
by David Gilbert
December 02, 2013
from
IBTimes
Aimed at creating the world's first mobile
community,
Freedom Ship will be the largest ship ever
built
at over a mile long and 25 storey high.
Freedom Ship:
The $10 Billion Floating
City for the Super Rich has been redesigned ahead of an expected launch.
Having been put on hold due to the economic
crisis, an ambitious project to build the world's biggest ship and
create "a community that offers unique lifestyle opportunities" is back
on track and seeking investors.
Freedom Ship will be a vast floating city
that will be more than a mile long and 25 storey high. It will cost
$10bn (£6.1bn, €7.4bn) to build and will constantly circumnavigates the
globe.
The ship will accommodate 30,000 daily
visitors, 10,000 nightly hotel guests, and 20,000 full time crew.
"This will be a very heavily capitalized
project and the global economy in the last few years hasn't been too
inviting for unproven progressive projects like ours," Roger Gooch,
director and vice-president of Freedom Ship International, told the
Telegraph.
"In the last six months we've been
getting more interest in the project and we are hopeful we will
raise the $1bn to begin construction," Gooch added.
Small airport
The 2.7-million ton ship will be four times
the length of the Queen Mary II and will be so large it will not be able
to enter any existing port. There is no dockyard in the world big enough
to build it.
As well as homes, Freedom Ship would contain
hospitals, schools, shops, parks and a small airport.
Despite reports, the company said that the
airport would not be able to accommodate aircraft the size of a Boeing
747.
"The largest aircraft this flight deck
can accept are turboprop aircraft in the 38 to 40-passenger range,"
the company said.
Voyage
The ship will spend 70% of its times moored
at locations around the world.
A circumnavigation of the world would take
two years.
The planned route runs from the east coast
of the US to Europe, around the north of Scotland to Scandinavia, back
down past France and Portugal into the Mediterranean, returning via the
Strait of Gibraltar to pass the length of west Africa, then along the
bottom of the Indian Ocean to Australia, southeast Asia, Japan and
across to the West Coast of the US.
Freedom Ship:
The route that the $10
Billion floating city will take every two years.
Is Freedom Ship a tax dodge?
On the project's
website, the company seeks to clarify a
number of misconceptions including the belief that it is a grand design
to facilitate tax evasion.
"The Freedom Ship community has not been
conceived as a tax haven.
While the community itself will levy no
taxes, citizens of countries such as the US would not realize any
income tax savings by residing in or running businesses in the
community, at least at the federal level, since American citizens
are taxed on their worldwide income."
However the company does concede that
residents of other countries,
"may realize tax savings by residing in
or running businesses in the Freedom Ship Community".
