The special liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) have put a collection of retail units at the base of the five-star Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston on the market. They are expected to fetch more than $100 million (€89.6 million).
It would bring US asset disposals by the liquidators of IBRC, formerly Anglo Irish Bank, towards a conclusion. It comes after they recently agreed to sell a number of social and affordable apartments in Boston to a local businessman for about €10 million, according to sources.
The so-called Mandarin Oriental Retail Collection, being marketed by Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) as a “one-of-a-kind trophy asset”, spans some 2,680sq m (28,856sq ft) of floor space and is anchored by a branch of Citizens Bank.
Anglo Irish Bank also once owned the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston, the city of its former US headquarters. The liquidators sold that property eight years ago for $140 million to Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental International Ltd, managers of the hotel.
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The liquidators, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of Interpath Ireland, have ratcheted up disposal activity in recent times – primarily centred on former assets of businessman Seán Quinn and his family – as the Government prepares to fold IBRC into the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) early next year.
IBRC, which was put into liquidation in 2013, seized Quinn assets following the financial crash as it attempted to recover €2.88 billion owed by the family.
Nama is on track to be wound down by the end of 2025 and the residual assets and liabilities of both crisis-era vehicles will be put into a new resolution unit to be set up by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).
A Melbourne-based property group owned by Irishman Tony Brady and his family emerged earlier this month as the preferred bidder for Mr Quinn’s once-prized Slieve Russell hotel, golf and country club.
The Brady Group, one of Australia’s largest private property development companies, bid below the €35 million asking price set by agents CBRE when the Cavan resort was put on the market in April on behalf of the IBRC liquidators, according to the Sunday Times.
The Quinns’ former Hilton Prague hotel was put up for sale over the summer by CBRE, acting for the liquidators, with a price tag of up to €290 million.
Elsewhere, the liquidators are seeking to sell the family’s former Buswells Hotel in Dublin and an Indian office complex, called Q City, in Hyderabad.
The main remaining former Quinn assets on IBRC’s books are an office building and shopping centre in Kyiv, an office building in Moscow and logistics centre in Kazan, almost 800km east of the Russian capital. However, sales plans for these assets have been hit by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Sources previously said that the Ukrainian assets were worth as much as €80 million before the war, while the Russian properties were valued at about €100 million.
[ Seán Quinn’s former properties in Kyiv: The battle and the warOpens in new window ]
Des Carville, head of the Department of Finance’s bank shareholding and financial advisory unit, told an Oireachtas finance committee hearing on Wednesday that the Russian and Ukrainian assets are now worth “a fraction of what they once would have been”. He did not provide the hearing with current or prior valuations for the assets.
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