THE Millennium Dome will be renamed O2, after the mobile phone company, in a £6 million sponsorship deal announced yesterday in an effort to kill off its white elephant image.

Plans were announced to turn the Dome into a Las Vegas-style performance venue and supercasino, to be opened in the spring of 2007. But The Times has learnt that taxpayers will have to pay £55,000 a month to maintain the building until then.

Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), the private company redeveloping the site, has started building work. The company will not take over financial liability for the building until the 23,000-seat arena is completed. By then it will have cost taxpayers more than £33 million since its doors shut to the public on December 31, 2001. The Dome, which has not recovered from a botched opening when hundreds of people were denied access to a televised ceremony, will host up to 150 music, entertainment and sports events in its first year.

At a presentation yesterday at the nearby Canary Wharf, AEG hoped that stars of the calibre of Sir Paul McCartney and U2 would perform at the venue. The company admitted that the proposals were based on speculation because the Government had yet to appoint an advisory panel to decide what facilities should go where. The deal with O2 was designed to make the Dome “a crown jewel not an embarrassment”.

The O2 arena will take up 40 per cent of the site, if the Government agrees, with an adjacent street a kilometre long lined with other attractions.

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