A plan to emulate the success of the London Eye in New York appeared dead in the water on Wednesday.
London-listed leisure investor Challenger Acquisitions, which is a minority backer in a consortium that has been trying to create a Staten Island wheel, today said it has received an update from the project’s developers.
Challenger Acquisitions has been informed that “there appear to be no viable options for financing the balance of the work required to complete the project”, which has incurred $453 million (£349 million) in construction expenses.
Mark Gustafson, Challenger's chief executive, said: "For all the stakeholders in the NYW project, this is definitely not a good development assuming the project does in fact not proceed."
The update follows years of battles and delays to get the privately funded scheme off the ground.
Money has been spent on infrastructure to support the proposed 630ft-tall wheel, but construction on the landmark itself has not started.
If it had gone ahead, the wheel would have been bigger than the London Eye, and have had some 3.5 million visitors per year. The wheel would have been equipped with $7 million of LED lighting.
Challenger’s shares almost halves to 0.07p.
