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The mayor has denied that a decision has been made to temporarily dismantle the bridge, although a municipal spokeswoman told AFP the previous day that the shipyard’s request to dismantle the central part of the well-known Koningshaven bridge had been granted.
This decision caused outrage and criticism on social media.
However, the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad quotes Ahmed Abutaleb, the mayor of Rotterdam, as saying: “It is quite strange. Nothing has been decided yet, there is not even an application for a permit”.
He said the municipality would look into the matter once an application for a permit had been received and the impact of the dismantling had been assessed, including whether it could be done without damaging the historic bridge and whether Bezos would pay for it.
Bezos’s huge € 430 million three-masted yacht is being built in Alblaserd, on the outskirts of Rotterdam. It is too large to sail under the bridge built in 1878, which was rebuilt after being bombed by Nazi German aviation during World War II.
In 2017, after extensive renovation work on the bridge, the municipality promised that the bridge would never be dismantled again.
Bezos, 57, is one of the richest people in the world. He also owns a space company “Blue Origin“In the New Shepard spacecraft he went into space last July.
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