People: Francesco’s new theme

Italian scientist and entrepreneur Professor Francesco Gardin is cutting something of a figure on the London smaller company scene these days. A China hand who compares today’s People’s Republic with ‘Naples after the war’, he has steered AIM investment minnow Brainspark through the morass of delisted London Asia Capital’s tangled investments in the ‘Middle Kingdom’ and has now moved it into Italian theme park developer Mediapolis.

Brainspark has agreed to subscribe £426,000 to an £896,000 capital raising by Mediapolis, which has planning permission for a £200 million theme park development between Milan and Turin. Locally well-connected Brainspark director Alfredo Villa, who is also a Mediapolis director and investor, will use his good offices to help market a proposed £500,000 fundraising by Brainspark to finance this investment.

The deal will give Brainspark nearly 11 per cent of Mediapolis, which has planning permission to develop a 148-acre theme park with a shopping centre, four-star hotel, outdoor theatre and television production centre 60 minutes’ drive from the Mont Blanc tunnel. Telecom Italia, controlled by the Olivetti group, holds 8.5 per cent of Mediapolis.

Gardin has been changing the focus of Brainspark, which previously backed China investor China IPO. The company, which lost £2.3 million last year, will have a small, indirect stake in the Mediapolis theme park once the project has been financed, and this will be one of a series of potentially interesting investments.

Tactfully, he will not be drawn on the vexed question of whether Marco Polo took noodles to China or brought them back.