Nah, the way they got that contract - along with a bunch of private sector funding - was by having previous experience running a ferry boat line to the UK until the Competition Commission forced it to shut down due to being owned by Eurostar, and (from what I can tell) by already having everything lined up to actually operate ferries by the time the opportunity came along. It turns out that you don't actually need to own a single boat to run a ferry and generally wouldn't want to. Instead, you need to be able to lease one of the handful of ferry boats of a suitable size to operate from their chosen port, and it just so happens that the company which owns the only suitable boats in the world ended the existing contracts right when the new ferry line would've needed them... if they hadn't imploded due to all the key players pulling out because the press coverage had lead them to believe the whole thing was fake, including the port at the other end and the funding (which earlier media coverage made it seem didn't exist, right up until the point it was pulled).

As far as I can tell, the British media destroyed a potentially viable new company by seeding the belief it was a scam just out of sheer anti-Brexit spite. That seems like a pretty good reason not to set up business in the UK actually.