Bishara Resorts,VAT and our growth!

The last few months have seen a huge expansion for Bishara, with the estates growing from Bishara Island (1 sim or island) to four islands in size, with Bahati Island and Mandhari Island as our residents and new commercial regions, and the exciting Epic wave region we call Majini Island.The main estate remains Bishara Resorts, and the development of the estates will be as follows:
1. Bishara Island will be the heart of the Bishara Resorts estate, as the name implies both ‘commerce’ and ‘gift’ or ‘blessing’ in its meaning. Bishara has all the exciting free activity features on it, and also has the first and original reef we started way back in February 2007.
2 Then the other sims will be split into three types, hopefully reaching 9 in total including Bishara Island.

These will be volcanic, beach or open ocean. However only Mandhari and Majini Islands will be normal sims (normal sims have 117 prims or objects per 512 sq meters with 15,000 in total for the whole 65,500 sq meter region), as the rest of the volanic and ocean or water sims will be Open Spaces or low prim sims (low prim density means that we have 15,000 prims over FOUR sims, not one.). These sims or islands will create an open space around most of Bishara, Bahati and Mandhari, and allow free space for water channels and horse trials around the entire estate.

Most of you may know this, but it is important to realize that the Bishara Resorts region and estates are all covered by Dumisani Ah only, not sponsored by a corporate company or a charity or Linden Labs. Parts of the estates that are not wholly financed by Dumisani Ah are the land parcels sold to some residents - currently 7 parcels all together. Everything else on the estate has been financed privately by Dumisani Ah, including stock in all the Bishara stores except for BodyFashion and Tatuii.

I state that here as I wish for you all to understand why we are so stressed by the application of VAT on ourselves, as it has increased our financing costs to run Bishara by 17.5% without any recourse, i.o.w. we cannot charge this through to anyone as the project, the Resort, has been financed to be at the free disposal of our residents and visitors.

In fact we cannot charge this through to anyone in SL regardless of the above point as only EU residents are VAT charged by Linden Labs and therefore as stated in our previous posts, we would be completely uncompetitive against other US resident owned properties if we did.

Sadly in the SL blogs I have noted just how much this VAT issue has caused the usual US vs EU vs UK arguments to flair up again, a very sad and childish way to deal with the issue. We hope that our own residents and in-world friends would instead unite to fight this alongside us so that we can get some reasonable compromise setup between Linden Labs and the EU residents like myself, regardless of where they are based in RL.

For the interim there will be no change to Bishara or its islands until VAT has been sorted out and comprehensively understood, and the current island developments completed and the Open Space islands dropped. Until then the project will not expand beyond its current island size.

We will keep you all informed of all new changes and additions in-world!

Asante,

Dumi