Marbella bids farewell to Sheikh Al-Thani 15 years after failed €84m port expansion

It continued on 17 May 2011, when the tender committee selected the bid submitted by a joint venture called Nas Marbella as the most economically advantageous.

The venture was 97 per cent controlled by the Qatari sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Thani, with the local authorities holding the remaining three per cent (split between Marbella Council and Puerto Deportivo de Marbella SA).

On the table was the sheikh’s vision of creating "a second Puerto Banús" with an 84-million-euro investment - a plan that, needless to say, never came to fruition after a long and tortuous history.

The contract for the expansion and operation of the marina came into effect on 1 January 2012, but the first breaches occurred that very same year. Al-Thani failed to pay the licence fee or submit the project on time.

Following a three-month ultimatum, the Andalusian regional government initiated proceedings to terminate the contract on 3 May 2013. However, the sheikh managed to increase the capital of his partner company in the joint venture (Nasir Bin Abdullah & Sons) by 5.3 million euros and paid 1.8 million euros in licence fees for 2012 and 2013.

Although everything seemed to be getting back on track, the breaches quickly resumed. The licence fee remained unpaid, the project was still not submitted, and architect José Seguí was left unpaid. Al-Thani’s shares in Nas Marbella were placed under judicial administration, and the sheikh was eventually ordered in June 2015 to pay 3.8 million euros to Seguí.

With the project still at a standstill, the council succeeded in July 2015 in getting the court-appointed administrator to order the dredging of the harbour, at an approximate cost of 200,000 euros. The regional government and the town hall then set a January 2016 deadline to break the deadlock - even searching for investors to partner with or replace Al-Thani. Ultimately, the contract was terminated on 25 November 2016 following a delay of more than four years and repeated failures to pay the licence fee.

Any hope of overturning the decision in court was dashed a few months later by a separate legal proceeding initiated by the rival joint venture that had competed against Al-Thani in the tender. In April 2017, the High Court of Justice ruled that the joint venture formed by Al-Thani and the council should never have been awarded the contract because it failed to meet the required solvency criteria.

The sheikh’s appeal against the ruling was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2018. Since 1 September 2026, that competing joint venture, Marina Internacional de Marbella, has formally taken over as the successful bidder for the contract first put out to tender on 27 November 2010.