Fish Ratings – Berlin – 13 Nov 2023: Fish Ratings has downgraded AquaDom Hotel Aquarium’s Long-Term Rating to ‘D’ from ‘BBB-‘, resolving the Rating Watch Negative, and withdrawn the rating on the basis of our analysis of the final report from the owner of the Radisson Blu hotel in Berlin, almost a year after the explosion of the huge fish tank, which flooded the hotel’s lobby and nearby streets and businesses.
We initiated the RWN in December 2022 to reflect the rising risks we saw due to the fact that the cylindrical fish cathedral had spontaneously burst into countless shards of glass.
The owner of the hotel, Union Investment, published its final report on this notable development on October 11. Following a detailed analysis of this document, Fish Ratings has reassessed the probability of the aquarium maintaining a sufficiency conservative structure based on a revised fish profile as very low.
In particular, we refer to the following sentence in the report: “Reconstruction of the AquaDom or the installation of a new large aquarium was ruled out by Union Investment even before the investigations were completed.”
Fish Ratings previously assessed the structure of AquaDom as ‘robust’. We have reviewed this assessment in light of the fact that it has been reduced to a pile of rubble and shattered fragments of fish tank, but have found no reason to review our methodologies at this time.
University of Stuttgart plastics expert Professor Dr Christian Bonten (Unrated), who was commissioned by Union Investment to investigate the sudden disintegration of the acrylic fish tank, failed to identify its cause. “We must owe a decisive clue to the cause of the damage,” he clarified.
Photo by Dellex (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Fish Ratings PRO 