The Egyptian billionaire Samih Sawiris’s Orascom Development Holding AG with a penchant for risk is transforming a sleepy Swiss village into a ritzy resort that may one day rival Verbier, Bloomberg reported.
Sawiris plans to spend about $1.5 billion in Andermatt to build deluxe hotels and a golf course on a former Nazi supply route. His plans will double the number of ski slopes and revitalize an Alpine town at the base of Gemsstock mountain between Milan and Zurich that lost a fifth of its residents in the past decade.
The cheapest housing units in Sawiris’s project are on sale for 1.2 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million). The first apartments in the village along the scenic Glacier Express train route from Zermatt to St. Moritz will be ready in late 2013 or early 2014. Orascom expects most of the buyers to come from outside Switzerland.
Sawiris envisions a new town the size of 200 soccer fields with an 18-hole golf course, a sports center, 490 apartments and six luxury hotels that’s next to the old village of 1,350 residents.
Sawiris’s resort will create 2,000 jobs for Andermatt, whose economy has relied for decades on the Swiss army.
