Member

Leaseholders will know that normally, over the life of the lease, your rights and the value of your lease diminish. There comes a point when you will probably not want to invest in your property because you will not be there for much longer or get the full value of it. That may well be the case here. Well before 99 years are up, seeing that we may not be able to keep it because it may be going to someone who will outbid us for it, we will not want to invest in it. So the value of this lease, the value of our right to use Diego Garcia, will decline before the 99 years are up. We all know that in Hong Kong the question of the 99-year lease made itself present a long time before the handover occurred.