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“BORIS, YOU OWE ME £90K FOR OLYMPICS” South African restaurateur bills London mayor Boris Johnson £90,000 for loss of turnover during Olympics
by STAFF REPORTER
W
ELATION: South Africa’s Caster Semenya proudly wears the silver medal she won in Saturday’s 800m Olympic final. Read about more of South Africa’s Olympic highlights on the back page.
hile Britain enjoys post-Olympic euphoria,the South African owner of a top-end City eatery has hand-delivered a bill of £90,000 to Mayor of London Boris Johnson for loss of revenue during the Olympic Games. Neleen Strauss said her restaurant High Timber, on the north bank of the Thames near the Millennium Bridge, is “normally well stocked with accountants, lawyers, bankers and visitors to this great city of ours. But since the Games began, I have lost 80 percent of my trade.” She believes the slump in turnover over the last fortnight is because Johnson’s un-researched ‘scaremongering’ tactics forced City workers to stay out of central London. “I blame Johnson for my lack of customers because, time and again, he warned Londoners to leave room for the millions of visitors he said would come to the capital. This inspired City bosses to suggest their employees either take their holidays during the Olympics, or work from home. There was no-one here. And the heralded influx of tourists didn’t
land in the city. They travelled east, where the action was,” the restaurateur said. Strauss called the situation a “travesty of miscalculation and scaremongering,” which could have been avoided had the mayor’s team researched how previous host cities had coped with transport congestion. “Johnson went into overdrive without properly calculating the consequences of his recommendations.” Strauss noted it was all very well Johnson telling Londoners that they would reap the long term benefits of the Games when “it’s the here and now that pays wages.” She said she had taken on the extra costs of paying staff to work because of new delivery times, and that had she known business would be so bad, she would have shut shop and sent everyone on holiday. Strauss, who runs High Timber in partnership with the Jordan Wine Estate in Stellenbosch, wants Johnson to pay the bill from his own pocket and not from the “seemingly limitless” public funds that supported the Olympics. “I’m not usually given to fits of pique. Nor will this break me. I’m South African and I deal with
Neleen Strauss is the owner of High Timber restaurant in the City of London, which has been left virtually empty during the Olympics.
problems head on, normally after a look at the cricket score while turning a chop on the braai. But no braai will fill the substantial void in my company account,” she said. Johnson was reported as responding, “In some places the picture is mixed, but there is a significant upturn in spending in restaurants and theatres.”