The owner of The Westbury Hotel, British multi-millionaire real estate developer Azad Cola, is co-founding a town called Petronia in Ghana.
The new city is to become a business hub for the oil, gas and mining industries in West Africa, according to Forbes. Petronia is to serve as a launch point for companies as they come to the country — oil was first discovered in Ghana in 2007.
“We are creating a blueprint for emerging market prosperity,” Cola told Forbes. “There are very few countries and very few examples in Sub Saharan Africa where producers, manufacturers and distributors neighbor [each other]. There has been a longstanding cycle of dependency which this industrial platform will break by creating a replicable template for sustainable development.”
Cola’s co-founder is a local entrepreneur, Nana Bediako, who recently started his own investment company, Capital Nine Zero. [Forbes]