Friday, June 08, 2012 -
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the corporate group which oversees InterContinental Hotels, on Thursday clarified the reasons for its departure from Uzbekistan late last month.
“When the hotel management agreement was renewed in August 2011, the owners promised a refurbishment of the rooms to meet our standards,” IHG Europe Public Relations Director Lucy Thomas told Central Asia Newswire (CAN) via email.
“Proposed designs were not acceptable and the rooms were not a good representation of the InterContinental brand. Also, the government of Uzbekistan reneged on a provision contained within the hotel management agreement, which protected IHG’s non-resident status.”
IHG stopped managing its InterContinental Hotel in the Uzbek capital Tashkent on May 27, according to the web site of the hotel.
The firm had managed the hotel since it entered into a joint venture with the Uzbek government 15 years ago.
The hotel is now operating under the name ‘InContinental Tashkent.”
The Uzbek government has a history of handling foreign investors in a belligerent manner. While it is trying to attract more foreign investment to the country, the government also has a reputation for re-nationalizing joint ventures arbitrarily and expelling investors from the country.