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Chinese Billionaire Plans Massive Iceland Resort, Locals See Oil Plot

Brendan Coffey
This article is more than 8 years old.

Chinese billionaire Huang Nubo wants to pay $9 million for 158 square miles of  remote northwestern Icelandic land to build what he says will be an eco-resort. Icelanders fear Nubo, chairman of tourism and development concern Zhongkun, actually wants to gain access to potential deepwater ports in Iceland and Arctic oil reserves rather than admire the view of the Vatnajokull National Park nearby.

Property development and tourism has allowed the 55 year old Nubo to build a personal fortune of $1.02 billion, putting him at 129 on our Forbes recent list of Chinese billionaires. At the end of August, Nubo offered  to buy  Grimsstadir a Fjollum farm, a small house and campground about has far away by car as you can get from Iceland's primary airport, Keflavik. One Icelandic tourism site described the area as 'surprisingly warm' in summer, but 'cruel' in winter. Nubo told China Daily his interest in Iceland stems from having an Icelandic roommate at Peking University, and that Icelandic friends encouraged him to buy on his first visit to the country one year ago. Last year China Daily noted that Nubo was planning a Reykjavik poetry forum and starting a China-Iceland Culture Fund.

Merely expressing a love of skaldic poetry isn't convincing many Icelanders, however. As the BBC noted,

"We face the fact that a foreign tycoon wants to buy 300sq km of Icelandic land. This has to be discussed and not swallowed without chewing," Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson wrote on his website.

Other Icelandic authorities believe the intent is to gain a foothold for China for future deepwater drilling in the Arctic as global warming opens up the northern climes.

"In talks with Icelandic authorities, (the Chinese) have made a point of saying it was very plausible" that China would use Iceland as a trans-Arctic shipping port, the chairman of the Icelandic parliament's foreign affairs committee, Arni Thor Sigurdsson, told AFP.

Nubo says he plans to invest as much as $200 million to build a golf course, resort and related facilities on the property. The aim is to cater to his firm's vacation club, the decidedly American-sounding Hawthorn Vacation Club. He disavows any political connection pointing as proof, incorrectly, that Forbes would not put him on the billionaires lists if he were a politician. Every person deemed to be Forbes to be a billionaire makes our lists.

Nubo is not a stranger to investing in property outside China - in recent years he has invested in a small shopping center in Los Angeles and bought 1,000 hectares outside Nashville for a resort project that reportedly has been put on hold. For his part, Nubo says if the Iceland deal dies, so do his plans of a series of Nordic country resorts.

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