The Legoland park will not finally see the light of day on the former Caterpillar site in Gosselies. The Danish company finally preferred to favor China and Korea as well as to strengthen its already existing parks.
“We wanted to make believe much too quickly that it was done“, regrets Jean-Yves Huwart, guest journalist on the show It’s not every day on Sunday. “We lack good news on the Walloon side so when you have the opportunity to raise a banner like this, we hope that it will make people forget all the failures at all levels. There are many failures and misfires for 25 years.”
“The problem is that Wallonia is managed by ministerial cabinets and sometimes by a few people in these cabinets who find themselves propelled into the tools of economic management in Wallonia. Basically, on a phone call from a minister, SOGEPA officials release 100 million euros for a project that does not exist. It’s an in-between. We can add that most of the people who advise the ministers and who then find themselves in these public bodies for life, are under the orders of the ministers, but they also tend to take themselves for geniuses of industrial geopolitics“, says the journalist as a torpedo for those concerned.
“We all took a slap“, recognizes Maxime Hary, Walloon PS deputy. “There were projects, jobs… There was every reason to believe in it and the public authorities did everything to attract an investor“.
Deputy editor of La Nouvelle Gazette de Charleroi, Loïc Dévière followed the case closely. He explains that a major change has taken place in the Lego group, which was indeed well on its way to building the park: “The CEO of the Merlin group, the big boss, just changed at the end of the year and he changed the strategy of the group. I met him in August, he met with Forem to find out what training people who were going to work at the park should do. He contacted Belgian companies to build the park. According to my information, Belgian companies have even gone to Korea to see what a new Legoland park is and how to build it..”
“The only thing we can blame our elected officials for is putting the cart before the horse. They didn’t stress enough that it was a non-binding agreement. What I criticize is that the elected officials that we saw a lot at the time of the signing, we no longer see them at the present time. Where is Paul Magnette? He reacted on Twitter, period“, asserts the specialist of the file.