Gibraltar wins World Trade Center bid

Oct. 17, 2010 - PRLog -- A £30m World Trade Center (WTC) is to be built in Gibraltar to help bring global recognition for the British Overseas Territory and ensure sufficient top quality office space is available to meet growing demand.

British property entrepreneur Greg Butcher gained the 335th licence to establish the WTC Gibraltar from the World Trade Centers Association annual assembly in Beijing at the weekend.

Butcher will increase by more than a third the office space he has at the Ocean Village commercial, residential and marina development when the new seven storey 13,600 m2 block is built in 2012.

“WTC Gibraltar will have a concierge reception for visiting senior inter-governmental and business leaders at the new Gibraltar international airport terminal now being built, state of the art video-conferencing and telephone communications and worldwide reciprocal business club, research and other facilities with more than 300 similar Centers across the globe”, he said.

The Gibraltar Government has been concerned that the lack of readily available quality office space could put a brake on further development in financial services and gaming as businesses are attracted by the territory’s new low 10 per cent headline rate of corporation tax.

Chief Minister, Peter Caruana was anxious that “we have got to have available on spec, quality office space; otherwise they will come, like the jurisdiction, but then won’t be able to locate here, because of lack of physical infrastructure.”

The World Trade Center Gibraltar has come about because all of the Ocean Village offices are already sold or leased.  The WTC Gibraltar building will have some floor areas of over 3,000 m2, the largest to be made available on The Rock.

After the Beijing decision, Butcher said: “Gibraltar will now have the world’s greatest address for international business.  This is a great day for Gibraltar and for our project that the members of the WTCA had such confidence in our ability to create a WTC Gibraltar of which the whole international community can be proud.”

The project, where over 1,000 people are expected to work, had received “a wealth of support from the Gibraltar business community and government”, he said, and Butcher added: “Now the real work begins.”


Brian Stevendale, WTC Gibraltar development director, said: “It has been proven that the presence of a World Trade Centre raises the business profile of the location in which it sits and the global alliance made possible opens up local businesses to a world of interconnections opportunity”.

Already many of the existing Ocean Village partners involved in stock trading, asset management and gaming, as well as businesses looking to set up in Gibraltar have expressed interest in expanding into the new project and more than 25 per cent of the space has been provisionally allocated.

“There is a real willingness from government and local and international business leaders for this project to succeed and with interest already shown, we are on target,” Stevendale declared.  

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For further information or images contact:

Brian Stevendale              or Ray Spencer
Development Director,            PR & Marketing Consultant
World Trade Center Gibraltar         World Trade Center Gibraltar
Telephone: 00350 200 40048         Telephone: 0034 637 966 383
e-mail: brian.stevendale@wtcgibraltar.com             e-mail: ray.spencer@wtcgibraltar.com