|
|
|
|
|
 Email+  Share+
Shelbourne owners may never see return on €230 million investment
07 February 2010 By Ian Kehoe
The owners of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin may never see any return on their €230 million investment in the St Stephen’s Green property. The consortium of investors, including property developer Bernard McNamara, bought the hotel in 2004 for €120 million and injected a further €110 million into a redevelopment and refit of the property.
However, court documents filed by John Sweeney, the Galway businessman who owns one-third of the hotel, state that the investors have earned nothing from the investment to date and there is no indication that there will be any return in the near future.
In documents to support a petition for examinership for Sweeney’s main company, Black Shore Holdings, his advisers said that Black Shore had ‘‘invested €24 million into the Shelbourne Hotel development’’.
They added: ‘‘To date, there has been no return on this development.
There is no expectation at present that there will be any return of investment in this property, nor indeed a repayment of capital in the short term."
The information is contained in an independent accountant’s report, prepared for Black Shore by Baker Tilly Ryan Glennon. The report is central to Sweeney’s examinership petition, which is due to be heard by the High Court tomorrow.
According to the report, Sweeney’s company and the other Shelbourne shareholders provided a ‘‘joint and several guarantee’’ to Anglo Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland for the borrowings of Shelbourne Hotel Holdings and a related company, Zambrook. Those loans could now be taken over by the National Asset Management Agency (Nama).
McNamara, one of the most active developers of recent years, recently acknowledged he was broke and his companies owed €1.5 billion. In addition to McNamara and Sweeney, the other shareholders in the Shelbourne are Bernard Doyle, Jerry O’Reilly and David Courtney.
|
|
|
