Thread: Germany will spend £450M housing up to 10,000 refugees at Holiday Inn hotels

German government in talks with hotels to home refugees in Berlin

Berlin Senate is looking to place 10,000 people in hotel rooms in the city

This would cost 50 euros (£38per person and night - or £13,647 a year

Berlin authorities want at a multi-year contract costing at least £455million

Sweden faces similar challenges with private companies making profits

The German government is negotiating a deal with a hotel chain to house refugees in the capital Berlin, set to cost the state £455million.

The Berlin Senate is reportedly looking to home 10,000 refugees and migrants in hotel rooms across the city, including at Holiday Inns, local media reports.

The scheme would cost the government 50 euros (£38 per person and night - or £13,647 a year, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports.

The Berlin Senate has been negotiating with the Grand City Hotels group which manages 22 hotels in the capital, including a number of Holiday Inns and Wyndham group hotels.

According to the paper, Berlin authorities are looking at a contract spanning over several years, set to cost at least 600 million euros (£455million).

Last year, the German capital saw some 80,000 people seek asylum in the city, with the numbers expected to hit a similar high for 2016.

Critics have pointed out that Berlin's homeless population is roughly 10,000 and that taxpayers' money is being used to house non-German citizens.

Further north, Sweden faces similar challenges, with local authorities turning to private contractors to find spaces for newcomers.

The Scandinavian nation, which has a population of some 9.8million, welcomed 163,000 people in 2015, including over 35,000 unaccompanied minors.

Housing asylum seekers, in particularly unaccompanied minors, have become a lucrative business in countries which have accepted large number of refugees and migrants.

One example is the Gothenburg suburb of Molndal, where a social worker was murdered at a home for child refugees last Monday, where greedy landlords in the town are hiking their rents by up to 1,450 per cent.

MailOnline found a number of studio flats on the rental market in Molndal priced from £335-£570 per month, however, the council is renting studio flats from private companies for £3,000-£4,500 per month - up to 680 per cent more.

One such company rents a 215sq feet studio flat for £245 a month, then charges the council £3,818: a 1,450 per cent increase, an investigation by Expressen found.

Another studio flat highlighted in the investigation was being rented out to Molndal City Council for£5,640 per month, but the owner of the flat said he only charges £737 per month – a profit of £4,903 a month, or 665 per cent.

These studio flats are 'transition housing', given to former unaccompanied minors once they are over 18 and have been granted asylum in Sweden.

'We are feeding big private companies, we have no other alternatives,' Birgitta Korpe, Molndal City Council's head care for unaccompanied migrant children, told Expressen.

'They can make extreme profits,' she added.

StegetVidare defended its 1,450 per cent profit by saying it provides more than basic accommodation for young new arrivals, adding that the charges also cover care and maintenance.

But Ms Korpe said the 'care' the company claimed they provided only amounted to checking in on the young migrants a few times a week.

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